Art made to be destroyed sounds like an avant-garde art project. But among the Kwakwaka'wakw, it's far from being new. They've been doing it for a long time.
The works with temporary lives are masks. They all illustrate stories owned - in an indigenous version of intellectual property rights - by the family of artist and chief Beau Dick. They're unlike other Northwest Coast masks intended to be sold for the market. Called Atlakim masks, they were all made knowing that they'll eventually be burned in a fire at a potlatch.
They come to the end of their ceremonial life once they have been worn and danced four times. But they have to be danced in the right context. Being danced, for example, in a non-ceremonial event such as a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre wouldn't count. It has to be in a traditional potlatch in the Kwakwaka'wakw Big House around the fire, Dick said.
"Their lifetime is four times dancing around the fire and they're recycled," he said in an interview.
"What I mean is that they're sent back to the spirit world where they came from. The greatest thing about it is that once they're burned, we carve them again."
The physical acts of making the masks again allows one generation to pass to the next both the stories each mask represents and the traditions of carving. There are usually four sets of masks so if there's any doubt about how one should be carved, there are other versions of the masks to refer to. And these days, of course, carvers can always consult photographs.
Time as a concept plays a big role in the Kwakwaka'wakw practice of making and destroying masks. It makes what many might see as a 'traditional' practice a 'contemporary' one. In public and private galleries, I'm seeing more and more examples of art that explicitly or implicitly explore time. In some cases, it's about time as duration and how its related to the increase in the perceived rate of change; in others, it's about time as a circle, circles or gyres rather than a line or lines. Making masks to be destroyed so they can be made again strikes me as an example of looking at the past not as something over and done with but as part of a cycle of endless renewal.
The potlatch masks are part of an exhibition The Box of Treasures: Gifts from the Supernatural at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. None have yet been danced in a potlatch. Out of reverence, they're not shown often so it's rare for them to be included in an art exhibition. The last time Dick showed potlatch masks was in an exhibition in 2012 at Macaulay & Co Fine Art shortly before they were danced for the fourth time and burned.
Adorned with wigs of cedar bark, the 24 potlatch masks destined to be burned are painted in traditional black, red and but there's a few added colours such as green and orange. They're also different from the other masks in the exhibition because they lack the same high quality finish as masks destined to be sold in galleries.
(Dick explained that a full set of Atlakim masks used to number 40. Over time, stories and dances for eight masks have been lost so a full set now is about 32. He said another eight still have to be made to add to the ones at the Bill Reid Gallery to make it complete).
Dick said to fully understand the masks and their context, people need to know the full story that explains how his ancestors encountered the spirit connected to each mask. Those stories are complex and detailed and can't be easily condensed into concise plot summaries.
When I asked him about specific masks that I thought looked interesting, Dick generously recounted edited versions of his family stories while emphasizing that each one is connected to a much bigger narrative.
Each of them have distinctive, expressive characteristics that set them apart from one another. The mask with the whiskers, buck teeth and big black ears, for example, is Mouse Woman, an important member of Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology because of the role she plays as a messenger. The biggest mask in the group is the oval-shaped Wind Mask (above) which shows people where to find medicine in the forest. The red cylinder in its mouth is medicine. Three smiling Laughter Masks are grouped together: the plain one represents the laugher of a child and the other two, elders. Death is represented by the stark black and white mask. It's called the Moss Mask because death emerged and rose up from the moss and started to dance (below).
The mask with the two bulging eyeballs is the Copycat Mask which represents learning and the ability to absorb knowledge (it's the image at the top of this post). The Copycat Mask is particularly dramatic in performance at a potlatch: when the dancer juts his head forward, the eyes pop out towards the audience.
The potlatch masks aren't displayed according to the usual museum practice of attributing each work to an artist. That's deliberate because it's often difficult to tell who is responsible for carving a potlatch mask, Dick said.
"When we're carving potlatch masks, this is how it will happen: 'I'll chop up this mask and get it so far and pass it to the next guy. He'll clean it up a bit more, and someone else will hollow it out and someone else will paint it. I will lose track of what I did because there was so much done in a short amount of time," he said.
"This is a collective spirit that brought us together to bring these masks to begin with. It would be unfair to give anyone credit for anything - although there are some masks here that maybe one artist had a bigger hand in than the rest."
Not only are there no names on the potlatch masks destined to be burned, the other masks in the exhibition by a number of Northwest Coast artists aren't attributed by name either. (Many of those masks are heirlooms that are danced repeatedly in potlatches and used until they fall apart.) The absence of names with each mask is deliberate and relates to the idea behind the exhibition: that all the masks of the Kwakwaka'wakw are from the Box of Treasures, the source of all culture.
(To anyone familiar with Dick's work, however, there are several masks that are so distinctive, they don't need to be identified by name because they're clearly his.)
In Kwakwala, Dick's name is Gigame Walis Gyiyam - Gray Whale. He is artist-in-residence at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of B.C.
Near the entrance to the exhibition is the Box of Treasures from Dick's family. The old wooden box with the lid ajar is in a vitrine with blankets spilling out of it.
Dick said the box of treasures has been in his family for 600 years. It's been used over and over again through the generations to "reveal our family treasures." He said as far as he knows, there are no other families that still possess their Box of Treasures. Others boxes are in private collections or museums around the world.
In a potlatch, once the box is opened, the family treasures - the masks, regalia, dances, titles, stories, territorial privileges and other cultural valuables - are dramatically revealed from behind a screen.
"We're very fortunate that our elders and families were able to maintain and protect this box where all the treasures come from," he said.
"That's why the show is called Box of Treasures: Gifts From the Supernatural. The box is our culture, our identity."
The Box of Treasures: Gifts from the Supernatural continues at the Bill Reid Gallery to Sunday, Sept. 27.
