Dinner in Honour of the Banff Centre's 75th Anniversary

Banff, Saturday, April 26, 2008

First of all, thank you. Thank you to The Banff Centre and its entire team. Thank you to Sarah Iley, with whom we have been working for several months to prepare for these two days of passionate Art Matters discussions on art made in Canada. Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and Sheila James for her support in preparing for this event. And thank you to all of you for being here and for sharing your wonderful and enlightening ideas on art as an essential resource.

Once again, The Banff Centre has shown its remarkable ability to nurture and encourage debate, new ideas and reflection.

If we had set out to prove that art is an essential and renewable resource, we needed to look no further than the twenty-five artists, arts administrators and academics, brought together here, from across the country, over the past two days. The energy, synergies and ideas of the group demonstrated that.

We realized very early on in this process the need to diffuse the message across all levels of our society that, just like air or water, the act of creation, the beauty of imagination, and the power of ideas, make life worth living. Our motto from yesterday morning was: “Arts make life more interesting than art.” And so it is up to all of us to share this idea, to echo it in our communities every day so that our fellow citizens understand how urgent it is that we act together, as citizens, for the common good.

For our first look back, it was almost natural to hold this forum in Banff, in the heart of this glorious natural architecture, designated by UNESCO as a world heritage site. These mountains, the surrounding nature, the climate and its severity, in short, the very northerliness of this place; that is the real founding myth of Canadian art.

In their wonderful essay, Beyond Wilderness, researchers John O’Brian and Peter White consider the impression this image of the Canadian North—pure and free from all external influences—has had on our art and identity. They said, “Canadianness was defined by way of northernness and wilderness,” and added, “the model of nationhood constructed by the Group of Seven positions Canada between the Old World ‘other’ of Europe and the New World ‘other’ of The United States, while insisting on its distinctiveness from both.” In our quest to uncover the identity of Canadian art, the North and the pieces by the Group of Seven have changed from works of art to icons. The purpose of this sacred image is to tell people who we are, and in so doing, we share this image with the world, we copy it and it ends up becoming the message itself.

In “Death by Landscape,” Margaret Atwood accurately describes the hold Northern landscapes have on her heroine, but she also expresses what the works of Tom Thomson, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris . . . have become to us: “Their work later turned up on stamps, or as silk-screen reproductions hung in the principals’ offices of high schools, or as jigsaw puzzles, or on beautifully printed calendars sent out by corporations as Christmas gifts, to their less important clients.”

Our identity and our art of course need solid foundations on which to build and grow. But when the National Gallery of Canada presented a retrospective in 1996 entitled “The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation,” it was as though we had forgotten that Canadian creation did not stop at the beginning of the 20^th century, that is has been enriched by the works of Aboriginal artists, the imaginations of new immigrants, urban cultures ...

So, yes, northerliness is a part of our identity and our culture. But during our workshop, when you each came up to show the image you thought represented culture made in Canada, you showed us the real diversity of Canadian creation.

Canadian identity is its land, yes, but it is also its people. In this country, this new home for so many, we encounter and are open to one another. These encounters constitute the mysteries of Canadian identity that will never be revealed, as one of our participants hopes. Because it is these mysterious differences that are the true wealth of our country and that keep our identity alive.

In one of our workshops, we expressed our culture in what I would call, in jest, a collective work. Indeed, like our country itself, art is a veritable collage of the diversity that forms our identities. It is multifaceted, in every colour, with every accent.

The energy we have displayed here gives me great confidence. It also gives me the courage to continue making films and writing books.

Creation is made of solitude and solidarity; it brings society’s driving forces together and produces its imagination. So what is made in Canada is also what Canada is made of.