FFWD Weekly
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| VISUAL ARTS Ardele Lister's Canadian Cuisine An Evening with Ardele Lister When internationally renowned film and video artist Ardele Lister offered to let me preview some video footage from her upcoming art installation at The Muttart Public Art Gallery, an installation entitled Canadian Cuisine, the only thing in my stomach was the remains of some salty, congealed eggs Benedict and coffee I'd (regretfully) ordered seven hours earlier. In 30 minutes I went from being hungry to suddenly being aware of how the food I eat might represent my relationship to my country to being really, really hungry. Lister gave me an apple. Perfect. But what I really wanted was a half dozen Tim Horton's doughnuts, pancakes, some bannock, a bowl of Kellogg's Just Right cereal, curry made from Canadian-grown lentils and some poutine, please. With maple syrup on the side. These are just some of the supposedly Canadian foods discussed in Canadian Cuisine. Lister combines stills, photographs, archival material, video and an interactive diner counter in an effort to playfully link Canadians' inability to clearly define Canadian food with our inability to define ourselves as a nation. What is Canadian cuisine? What makes someone Canadian? The installation grew out of a larger video project dealing with Canadian issues entitled Conditional Love, a video that explores the complex relationship between patriotism and propaganda in a Canadian context, which premiered last year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. If the location surprises you, consider that Lister, a Calgary native, has been living in New York for the last 20 years and working on projects involving patriotism and propaganda for the last nine years. She has plenty to say when it comes to complex relationships with one's home and native land. Lister had been living in New York for several years - where she began publishing and editing The Independent, the only magazine in America dedicated to the interests of independent media makers, as well as teaching at Rutgers University - when Canada signed the Free Trade Agreement. She sees the signing as the moment when her interest in Canadian nationalism was reinvigorated. "I was really shocked that more Canadians weren't upset about free trade," Lister recalls. "I know what American culture demands not just of its own people, but of whatever kind of colonial subcultures it controls. Because of that I was more fearful of what it would mean for Canada to sign off on free trade." In an effort to uncover and possibly debunk the factors that make Canadians Canadian and Americans American, Lister spent nine years investigating corporate and educational videos from each country and interviewing patriots on their respective national holidays. She ended up with two video pieces: Behold the Promised Land, which deals with American nationalism, and Conditional Love, which deals with Canadian nationalism. Canadians were considerably less enthusiastic about their national holiday and their nation in general. "I remember going back to the States and looking at all my footage and being so disappointed," Lister says. "I feel like a very patriotic Canadian even though I don't live here. I wondered why it was that I was patriotic in the way that I am and why all these people who in my interviews weren't. It bothered me." Lister admits that her feelings of patriotism may come in part from being a Canadian who lives outside of Canada and points out that it's easier to see the positives from the outside. "Many Canadians take for granted and are easily convinced that we can't sustain health care and that we have to be more like the States," Lister says. Rather than allowing Canada to become "more like our Darwinian neighbor to the south," Lister believes that we should be using our well-developed social net as a unifying factor. "What makes us Canadian finally is that we live in a place in which there is a way of life that includes socialized medicine. That's something that definitely makes people live in a similar realm. Maybe we're paying more taxes than Americans, but we believe in the reasons for doing that. We care." Why is such a patriotic soul abiding in the land she fears will overrun her home land? Lister has no easy answer for that although she feels she has a kind of ambassadorial function. "I think that Americans have a lot to learn from Canada. Whenever possible I try to educate people about Canada. Sometimes that means I'm educating Canadians about Canada." If there is one thing that Lister wants people to take away from her work, Canadian Cuisine and Conditional Love in particular, it is a stronger sense of who they are. "That includes being able to laugh at ourselves," she says. |