Over the last fifteen years a select group of professionally
trained and politically astute Canadian artists of Native
ancestry has produced a compelling body of work that owes much
of its power to a wry and ironic sense of humour rooted firmly
in oral tradition. More than a critical/political strategy,
such humour reflects a widespread cultural and communal
sensibility embodied in the mythical Native American
Trickster. The present study explores the influence of this
comic spirit on the practice of several artists through the
presentation of a "Trickster discourse," that is, a body of
overlapping and interrelated verbal and visual narratives by
tricksters and about trickster practice.
Most of the research for this project took place between
January 1990 and November 1991 and involved extended
conversations with artists, elders, actors, writers,
linguists, curators and art historians in six Canadian
provinces. Over 80 hours of interviews were amassed along
with several hundred slides and photographs of artists' work.
From this body of material 140 images were selected for
analysis with well over 100 commentaries and reflections on
practice excerpted from the interviews. These verbal and
visual narratives have been gathered together under the broad
headings of self-identity, representation, political control
and global presence. In light of the highly eclectic and hybrid nature of these
narratives, an eclectic and hybrid conceptual framework has
been constructed to consider them. Accordingly, a
multiplicity of theoretical concepts has been braided together
and interwoven throughout the chapters to reflect the
complexity, density and interconnectedness of the material.
To convey the sense of raultilayered communication and
simultaneous conversation, quotation and footnote have been
used extensively as parallel and overlapping texts. In this
they constitute a form of hypertext or hypermedia. More
importantly, the text honours and participates in a non-linear
process of representation shared by many of the artists.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8701 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Ryan, Allan J. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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