Joyce Wieland, a Tragicomic Canadian, Offered Cues to Live Larger

“I wasn’t going to check my sense of humor, my idea of color, at the door for a bunch of people who lived by theory alone,” Joyce Wieland said in a 1987 documentary of her life, Kay Armitage’s Artist on Fire. “I didn’t want to live in a world that they would create.”

So in response to grey gloom, the late artist, born in Toronto in 1930, offered up pastels, instilling in her viewer the sense that one can dissolve, play around, and build again. This much is evident in her retrospective, “Joyce Wieland: Heart On,” on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through May 4.

Before visiting the show, I knew of Wieland’s sensibility through her brilliant experimental films. Screened at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives in May 2022, they all deserve to be better known, especially Rat Life and Diet in North America (1967), which Jonas Mekas called “the most effective political film around.”

But the Montreal show bridges the gaps between Wieland’s films, paintings, quilts, and political engagement, showing that none of these can be separated from the others. Each canvas, filmstrip, and bubble-font quilt is an opportunity for this rangy Canadienne to indulge another pun, luxuriate in “a strange coexistence of irony and sincerity,” to quote one of the show’s curators, Anne Grace.

Where the US Abstract Expressionists of Wieland’s time all got onboard the Grim Express, self-mythologizing and struggling with the gods, Wieland—serving coffee in a ’60s Manhattan diner and working at home while her husband Michael Snow worked in the studio—was more elastic in her consideration of politics and art. In Wieland, the beautiful is maturely jammed together with the silly. The show’s titular painting Heart-On (1962) suggests an erection but offers tender deflations instead: the canvas is torn and stained with a butcher’s blood-red, along with a blooming row of schoolyard hearts, the sort that populate cards for Valentine’s Day crushes. Elsewhere, in Hallucination (1961), she paints in flaccid penises, adding tee-hee to fields of Miró-and-Monet blue. Clothes of Love (1961) literally tears the canvas apart, showing it up as just a bunch of cloth to be hung out to dry.

Around the time of these paintings, Wieland tumbled into film; the show features two newly restored ones, Sailboat and Handtinting (both 1967). In the former, Wieland films sailboats entering in and out of frame, evoking a kind of deathliness when the boat exits, ceasing to exist to us. She became fascinated with plane wrecks and boat sinkings in the mid-1960s; for her, they signified a big existential sneeze, a pathetic yet unremarkable fact of life, a signal to live larger.

In Handtinting, conceived the same year of her breakthrough Rat Life, Wieland, Sylvia White, and Jane Bryant, hired by Xerox, filmed a group of Black women who worked at a vocational center in West Virginia. Xerox ultimately shelved the project, but Wieland culled a film from the footage. We see the women talking, joking, and laughing in between breaks. Wieland then colored the film with dye and stitched frames with quilting needles, whose traces can still be seen when the film is projected. The result is an homage to labor unseen, “a pioneering work of avant-garde feminist film praxis,” per the film theorist Laura Mulvey.

Her quilts exploring Canadian politics, via the late-1960s ascension of the liberal Pierre Trudeau, are here in their ironic glory. (And her great film synthesizing the times, Reason over Passion, 1969, plays as part of a concurrent Wieland Cinémathèque retrospective.) Trudeau’s infamous words—<small>REASON OVER PASSION</small>—are quilted in pink, bubbly letters. The work, skewering the tenets of liberalism, is friendly on the surface, business-as-usual beneath. Trudeau, not seeing through Wieland’s joke, accepted the quilt as a sincere gift, but his ex-wife had the last word: in her autobiography, she confessed to having once torn the letters off and hurling them at her husband, whom she divorced his final month in office, in a fit of Wielandian passion and reason.

Wieland’s final years see her reckoning with the relationship between North and South Canada and with the brutal legacy of settler colonial violence: A visit to the region in 1977 made her realize how much she had unconsciously inherited settler colonial ideas. A meeting with the Inuit artist Surusilutu Ashoona inspired a wave of self-reflection, and the paintings and drawings from the last years of her life—she succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 1998, at the age of 67—were progressively softer, more private, and so delicately colored that one has to get up close to note her fine wispy lines. She tried, however stumblingly, to decenter what she considered her Self in these late works, noting that her neighbors were caribou as well as humans. On a wall in the show hangs a quote from Wieland: “If we want to save the planet, it’s women who must lead the way.”