This thesis examines the photographs of terminal grain elevators
produced by John Vanderpant, a successful Vancouver commercial
photographer who also produced images that were consciously positioned
within a high art discourse. Vanderpant turned to the grain elevator as subject
matter in response to the remarks of an unidentified English critic who, while
praising the images in a 1925 London exhibition of Vanderpant's work, noted
they lacked an identifiably Canadian character. In taking up the grain elevator,
Vanderpant positioned his work within the national visual culture constructed
around the work of the Group of Seven. He also tapped into symbolic
meanings which resonated around the elevator's modern functional
architecture, an architecture which has been held up by Le Corbusier as a
specifically North American expression of the engineer's rigor and purpose. In
the midst of the prosperity enjoyed by Vancouver's urban bourgeoisie during
the mid-1920s, the terminal elevators operating on Burrard Inlet embodied the
promise of abundance held out by an increasingly centralized and modernized
resource economy.
Vanderpant's earliest elevator photographs employed the stylistics of
Pictorialism, a genre of photography that relied on soft focus and hazy
atmospheric effect to suggest a painterly surface. In response to the tension
between his formal vocabulary and the modernity of his subject matter,
Vanderpant rejected Pictorialism as a mode of representation that "travelled by
horsecart midst the progress of motor power on wheel and wing." Throughout
the 1930s he worked within a modernist idiom that emphasized what were seen
to be the intrinsic properties of photographic technology: sharp focus, clearly delineated form, and tilted perspective. His modernist elevator photographs
verged on geometric abstraction, in an attempt to penetrate "superficial
appearance" and reveal the underlying "strength and sublime simplicity" of the
elevator's structure. Combining an interest in mysticism and a Kantian
understanding of aesthetic experience, Vanderpant accessed a version of
modernism that held onto an optimistic, Utopian vision in the face of the social
fragmentation of the Depression.
My thesis addresses the position of Vanderpant's elevator photographs,
and the shift in his aesthetic vocabulary marked out by these works, in relation
to the construction of a national movement in Canadian visual art and an
historical context in which the state and capital were employing specific
measures to unify and transform a fractured social body. I argue that, within this
context, Vanderpant's project was fragile and contradictory. Despite the antimaterialism
he articulated as the Depression advanced, the ideological force of
Vanderpant's Utopian vision would seem to have been aligned with the forms of
modern scientific discipline, such as Taylorism, that promised Utopia through
success in production while naturalizing dominative social relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4342 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Arnold, Grant |
| 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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