Life, art, ambition

Page 25

Bill Reid:

The Making of an Indian

By Maria Tippett

Random House Canada

336 pages (hc)

$39.95

The life and work of Bill Reid has been the topic of a number of documentaries and books over the years, the latest of which comes from Victoria-born Dr. Maria Tippett, an award winning author who has penned a number of books on art, culture and history.

Her book, Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian, is the biography of an accomplished artist who struggled with being too Indian for white society and too white for the Native community. It is a book about a man who failed at relationships with women, fought a ceaseless battle with manic depression, and could never break away from his connection to Native art in order to fulfill his desire to create beautiful modern jewelry.

It is also the chronology of the transformation of Native art from handicraft and artifact to internationally appreciated fine art.

In her book, Tippett traces Reid's career, as he grew from a radio personality who made jewelry on the side to a world-renowned artist often credited with bringing West Coast art back from the brink of extinction, at least according to the non-Native community. Tippett points out, however, that Reid didn't so much resurrect a dying art form as attract more attention to what Native artists had been creating all along. He did this, Tippett says, by making Native art more palatable to a Western audience.

Tippett recounts both the low points of Reid's career, such as his failure to find funding for many of his more ambitious projects, and the high points, such as his $3 million commission to create The Jade Canoe for the Vancouver International Airport.

She also recounts Reid's ceaseless work to have Native jewelry and carvings accepted as fine art rather than viewed as handicraft, something that continues to benefit Native artists today.

Throughout the book, Tippett raises a number of questions about Reid, his work, and what makes Native art Native. Was Reid being truer to the art when he was simply replicating the work of his forefathers, or when he took from their work and adapted it to meet his own standards of style and form?

While Haida imagery dominated Reid's work, he was creating art, purely for the aesthetic, rather than for ceremonial purposes or to tell a story, as did Reid's predecessors. As examples, Tippett cites the totem poles Reid helped create for Totem Park at the University of British Columbia in 1959, which Reid himself admitted featured crests that would likely have never been found together on a traditional Haida totem pole. Could his creations be true Native art when he used creatures from Haida mythology, but without the intention of using the associated myth? Was he creating Indian art when his concern was for form, not function, for appearance not meaning?

Reid's use of non-traditional tools was also called into question on occasion, such as his use of a chainsaw to strip the bark off a tree and rough out the design before carving a totem pole. Was a work using Haida imagery still a Native work if it was created with modern tools and modern materials?

The book also takes the reader through Reid's declining years, when Parkinson's disease slowly took away his ability to create with his own hands, and left him to direct the hands of others in order for his artistic visions to become reality. This too was a point of contention, with critics questioning whether something could be the work of Bill Reid if Reid himself did none of the carving.

In the end, the readers are left to make up their own minds about Bill Reid. Was he a gifted artist who helped revitalize West Coast Native art in Canada? Or was he simply co-opting the art of those who had gone before him and repackaging it for a Western audience? Or was he both? Reid often referred to his works as "artefakes," Tippett reveals in the book, but also saw them as examples of fine art that deserved to be on display in museums and art galleies.

With Reid having his own contradictory views of his work, it's no wonder that others have difficulty with these questions.