“We all need the tonic of wildness.” Henry David Thoreau, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854
By any measure the Bonavista Biennale is a massive undertaking. It involves installation of contemporary artworks by multiple artists at multiple sites across Ktaqmkuk’s (Newfoundland’s) rural Bonavista Peninsula. Each iteration is years in the making, reliant on a tiny team with an extensive network of community partners and connections built through sustained collaboration. As co-curators of this 2021 Biennale, reflecting on catastrophic world-shaking events of the past two years, it seems a small miracle that The Tonic of Wildness happened at all.
Yet it did. Twenty-six internationally practicing Newfoundland and Labrador, Indigenous and other Canadian artists presented with and within the Bonavista Peninsula’s built and natural environments—heritage structures, cliffs, community buildings, fields and more—embedding contemporary art in historic spaces and the deep history of this landscape. In acknowledgement of the on-going pandemic, 15 of the 26 sites were outdoors.
The defining experience of the Bonavista Biennale is the individual visitor’s direct physical engagement with an artwork, in a specific indoor or outdoor place, within the wider natural environment and culture of the Bonavista Peninsula. Artworks often are responsive to site. Each site comes with specific sounds, smells, textures, objects, stories and more that enrich the encounter, creating a unique experience not amenable to mediation via an on-line “pivot”.
Relatively early in 2020, during the pandemic’s first wave and lockdowns, Biennale organizers considered either postponement or proceeding in 2021 as scheduled. After careful assessment of risks, challenges and opportunities in the context of Ktaqmkuk’s (Newfoundland’s) unique and fortunate circumstances, the decision was made to proceed. The event slipped in between pandemic waves and travel bans.
Biennale exhibitions are informed by a theme with resonance, both within the region’s culture and environment, and also in terms of the critical milieu of contemporary art. Our theme was determined pre-COVID shutdown, a time and living circumstance now almost impossible to imagine. In this Anthropocene era—created by human-engineered interventions in earth, water and air, altered through rapid climate change—exploration of 21st-century relationships between humans and nature seemed fertile territory for Biennale artists and audiences.
Our exhibition title and framework, however, come from the mid- 19th century, from radical thinker and early nature writer Henry David Thoreau, best-known for his work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. His statement ‟We all need the tonic of wildness” is apt: poetic, generative, forward-looking, inherently acknowledging the need for transformation from existing malaise. But throughout our curatorial process, especially in conversations with artists, we continued to stress that the theme should serve as an umbrella, not a cage; a jumping-off point rather than essential focal point.
Biennales are intended primarily as platforms for new works and commissioned projects. Artists are encouraged to push their practices in response to sites, ideas generated by place and history, locally available skills and materials, and the prospect of new audiences for their work. While an increasing percentage of viewers come specifically for the Biennale, many are area residents and tourists, some encountering contemporary art for the first time. The Biennale has a distinct “stumble upon” factor that is a key to its success. The combination of artists’ ambition, the often large-scale works and the grand scale of the peninsula—sometimes augmented by local site attendants’ compelling animation—pulls in new visitors and shifts understandings of what art can be.
As the full implications of the pandemic began to register, practical concerns around production of the exhibition became our major concern. But the theme took on new resonance. COVID’s disruption of our daily lives, profound as it was (and is), was one in a cascade of overlapping cataclysmic events: deep-seated social unrest catalyzed by discussion of decolonialism, reconciliation, Idle No More and Black Lives Matter; deadly manifestations of climate change, including floods, heat waves and wildfires, underscoring the environmental crisis; and the disruption of traditional media, communications and industry by a digital revolution with increased emphasis on online connectivity, fraught with misinformation, hostility and division.
The figure of Thoreau, if re-examined in the light of these contemporary realities, retains or gains relevance. A profoundly influential philosopher, writer and environmentalist, Thoreau is foundational in Western thought and beyond—a radical in his time. This white male settler’s thinking was key to notions of Western individualism, civil disobedience and abolition of slavery, and he left an unpublished text on Indigenous epistemologies.
Yet his hypocrisies are also evident. His vaunted transcendent solitude and self-sufficiency is undermined by his mother doing his laundry while he pursued his “life in the wood” at Walden Pond. More significantly, the wildness that Thoreau believed could serve as tonic requires subjugation and a bending of nature to the will of man. This complexity surfacing within the legacy of Thoreau’s thought and contemporary relevance—acute in any such prominent white male figure in the Western canon—deepens the relevance of the theme for the 2021 Bonavista Biennale.
We can tease out, in individual artists’ work in this pandemic Biennale, specific connections with COVID’s cruel circumstances as well as with human-nature relationships. These include Michael Jonathon Pittman’s Black Island paintings, speaking of deep isolation and loss, not only in his Indigenous and settler ancestors’ lives but during the pandemic; Gerald Beaulieu’s 27-foot-long kinetic sculpture Extinction, a dinosaur drinking deep from a barrel of oil; the large-scale photographs by seven Indigenous Northern Labrador artists, which express a knowledge of and intimacy with wildness that come from lived experience; Janice Wright Cheney’s textile-based installation that continues her investigation of forests’ “re-wilding”.
Broadly, the artists in this year’s Bonavista Biennale underscore processes of erasure, questioning historicization and our extractive and exploitive relationship to nature. Taken collectively (a hazardous exercise that obscures nuance and complexity) these artists centre alternative epistemologies, expanding ways of knowing and collective being, shifting understandings of the potential in wildness, in the feral and wanton, as impetus and source for innovation.
Distilled in its simplest form “the tonic of wildness” is a notion of rewilding: the idea that, left to its own devices, nature will heal itself. But we cling to the idea of “dominion”. As American novelist Richard Powers recently commented in an interview in The Globe and Mail, we “think of ourselves as somehow exceptional and separate…and think of the rest of the planet as a resource for our own purposes. What has to change is our entire cultural outlook.” As we collectively parse viable and sustainable paths forward from this time of intersecting cataclysms, contemporary artists and art are uniquely equipped to rise to this moment.
