A Monster Painting Monsters: Norval Morrisseau and His Painted Images
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When early explorers encountered Indigenous peoples in the Americas they imagined original peoples as the ‘monstorous race’ in ways similar to established frames of encounters with the Other throughout Western culture. Such notions endure. Racialized constructions remain present in popular culture in Canada. Throughout the last five hundred years stereotypical tropes related to monsters, often describes as the attributes of the ‘ignoble Savage,’ have been mapped onto the bodies of Indigenous peoples. Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau was the first Indigenous artist in Canada to enter the terrain of the mainstream art world when he exhibited his artwork at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto, Ontario in 1962. His identity and his art were characterized as monstrous in press reports. Much of the discourse surrounding Morrisseau’s art implies the concept of the monstrous. Because Morrisseau mostly painted spiritual beings from Anishinaabe culture such as the so-called water monster Micipijiu, the media used those dramatically unsettling images to symbolically conflate the artist and his espied behaviors with that of the monsters he created on paper and canvas. Misread as the monstrous, the spirit beings instead function within a complex cultural milieu. This chapter will examine how the media has fused an artist’s colonized and Othered identity to painted imagery relying on imagined tropes. Upon closer analysis, I argue that it is the Canadian nation-building process that, while mapping the monstrous onto Indigenous bodies, has been the menacing presence in this equation. Morrisseau’s painted beings, then, ‘read’ semiotically in two ways. First, as personal and cultural expressions that reflect his interpretation of Anishinaabe narratives, and second, as visual expressions of an ongoing colonial geography mired with monsters.