Carl Beam – Essay

by Allan J. Ryan

“My works are like little puzzles, interesting little games. I play a game with humanity and with creativity. I ask viewers to play the participatory game of dreaming ourselves as each other. In this we find out that we're all basically human…. My work is not fabricated for the art market.  There's no market for intellectual puzzles or works of spiritual emancipation.” – Carl Beam ¹

For over 25 years Carl Beam has been provoking, prodding, teasing and engaging viewers in games of intellectual play and philosophical reflection. Like the Anishinabe author Gerald Vizenor, he possesses an ironic imagination which flows from a worried heart.

Born in 1943, in M’Chigeeng (West Bay), Manitoulin Island, Ontario, of Ojibway and non-Native parents, Beam earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria in 1974 and graduate credits from the University of Alberta before becoming a full-time artist in the late 1970s. Drawing power and inspiration from his dual heritage, Beam creates visually sophisticated art that is rich with personal, tribal and global reference. From his first major exhibition, Altered Egos (1984), at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, to The Columbus Boat (1992), at The Power Plant in Toronto, and his recent show, The Whale of Our Being (2002), at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Beam has consistently challenged himself and his audience through works executed in an impressive range of media: watercolour, etching, ceramic ware, photo-transfer on canvas, acrylic on Plexiglas, installation and even adobe construction.

Beam’s artwork is further distinguished by an eclectic and ever-expanding personal iconography – a visual vocabulary of signs, symbols and images culled from family photo albums, academic journals, mass media publications and traditional Aboriginal art forms. In varying formats he combines and recombines visual and textual fragments from the past and present to interrogate history and illuminate contemporary experience. Frequently, Beam overlays imagery with handwritten notations, as in the painting, Big Dissolve (2002), where he writes, “the little pieces and the little pixels all worked in a weird harmony leaving only a memory of an incomplete poetry...” This is an apt analogy, for Beam’s art is indeed poetic. While sharing certain attributes with postmodern pastiche, his work is more in tune with the poetics of ritual placement and traditional Ojibway shamanic practice than with recent trends in Western artistic production. “Things have a power in and of themselves,” he says, “a peculiar emanation. The task of the artist is to set up a dialogue between objects.” ²

Beam has become skilled at constructing such dialogues, opening up a critical space for further exchange between individuals and between cultures. To quote Ian McLachlan in a discussion of Beam’s Columbus Boat project, “All that counts is the power of the objects he makes, their ironic magic that enables us to see some of the lies we’re not supposed to see and to make the connections we’re never encouraged to make.”³ Beam has few equals when it comes to displaying a mastery of ironic magic. It is perhaps a talent inherited from Nanabush, the trickster of Ojibway mythology.

Beam has participated in many landmark exhibitions, including In the Shadow of the Sun (1989), at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, Germany, Indigena (1992), at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and Land Spirit Power (1992), at the National Gallery of Canada. His work has been exhibited internationally and collected by, among others, the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 1986, the National Gallery purchased Beam’s large mixed-media meditation on time and technology, The North American Iceberg, the first work by an Aboriginal artist to be acquired by the Gallery in nearly six decades. It was a historic moment, marking the beginning of a new relationship between the National Gallery and Canada’s Aboriginal arts community. In 2000, Beam was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The arc of Beam’s personal aesthetic and his strategies of intellectual engagement are evident in his earliest works. For example, The Artist and Some of His Concerns, a watercolour from 1982, locates the artist in the centre of a modern world, defined on the left by the paired media images of the assassination of Anwar Sadat and scientific drawings of horse heads, and on the right by two views of a bald eagle, the symbolic embodiment of Native American spirituality. Both the artist and the eagle peer out from behind a fine, white, fence-like grid of cultural containment that doubles as a symbol of incremental and intrusive analysis.

In Chronos 2, one of a series of mixed-media installations from 1989, the white grid of containment has been re-imagined as a white box of sterile display. Here, Beam constructs mock museum display cases, complete with discrete specimen compartments across the bottom, to question the practice of exhibiting Aboriginal peoples alongside “other” exotic phenomena of natural history. Here and elsewhere, his critique of the scientific method and linear thinking finds symbolic expression in the presence of parallel lines, alpha-numeric sequencing and primary colours, said to contain all other colours. Beam constantly questions the nature of knowledge provided by technology and scientific investigation, suggesting the presence of a more intuitive indigenous knowledge that remains largely unrecognized.

In more recent work, such as Summa 2 and Mystery, from the series, The Whale of Our Being (2001-04), Beam examines the calamitous moral fallout from what he perceives as a profound spiritual absence in contemporary society, symbolized by a great whale of primordial proportions. In its murky and disquieting shadow, he re-examines the media construction of violence and infamy and the public fascination with celebrity, while pondering the paucity of venues for works of intellectual play and spiritual emancipation. 
 
Throughout his career, Beam has raised necessary and troubling questions about the human condition. He engages us on personal and social levels, about topical issues, including the health of the planet. He brings a mature and fully-realized personal vision to contemporary Canadian art and has inspired a generation of First Nations artists to go beyond the depiction of Indian myths to address “myths of the Indian,” and their own lived experience. He continues to challenge himself as an artist and work his ironic magic in new and unexpected ways.

Allan J. Ryan holds the New Sun Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is the author of The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (“trickster shift” is a term coined by Carl Beam to describe his own artistic practice).

1. Interview with the author. In Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, Vancouver and Seattle, UBC Press and University of Washington Press, 1999, p. 151.
2. ibid.
3. “Making Mizzins – Remaking History”, in ARTCRAFT 2 (2), 1990, p. 12.