Art exhibition catalogues BOUCHARD, Marie, 2002 Marion Tuu’luq, Exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, National Gallery of Ottawa, 110 pages. WIGHT, Darlene, 2003 Rankin Inlet Ceramics, Exhibition catalogue, Winnipeg, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 64 pages. WIGHT, Darlene, 2004 The Jerry Twomey Collection, Exhibition catalogue, Winnipeg, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 128 pages.

The exhibition catalogue as a form can be an odd little hybrid. Long after the exhibition has been struck, and objects returned to owners or the vault, the catalogue remains, recording the absence of presence through image and text. Sometimes it appears after the exhibition has closed, subject to the instability of gallery funding and tight time lines. Design considerations, the quality and numbers of the visual images determine how we view the catalogue and make meaning of its arrangement of images, texts and ideas. Given the competing mandates of writers, curators, designers, donors, institutions, patrons, and art councils; the exhibition catalogue as published by the art museum or gallery is, to borrow a concept from Freud, overdetermined. It is a record sometimes more, sometimes less, faithful to the exhibition experience. But verisimilitude to that experience is not necessarily the criterion of excellence when evaluating exhibition catalogues. Scholarship and new research are important components of the art writing held between the covers. Often, new data is brought to the fore by art historians and curators. The objects in question are re-contextualized or re-considered based on aesthetic and extra-aesthetic concerns. The essays extend the reach of the exhibition and set the ambulatory narrative of physical objects in space into textual form with description and argumentation. Such art writing, research and interpretation is of interest to connoisseurs, commercial dealers, donors, patrons, museologists, and academics. Is the purpose of the exhibition to extend connoisseurship? If so, then the bringing together of discrete objects for the benefit of close visual inspection is important for both exhibition and catalogue. Are the exhibition and catalogue part of the process of institutional or individual aggrandizement? If so, then it is more likely that boosterism rather than arguments of substance will be encountered therein. The look and feel of the exhibition catalogue is borne of its institutional relationship to the host museum or gallery. The semiotic strategies may demand a director’s waving of the flag, symbols of various art council logos, and acknowledgements of past productions. One of the catalogues under discussion here, Rankin Inlet Ceramics (Wight 2003) published by the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), is similar in scale and shape to the well known series of exhibitions and catalogues that the WAG produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Slim enough to be slipped into a handbag or a pocket, these were devoted to the work of individual communities and included small but copious illustrations and relevant essays by Inuit Art experts and practitioners. They were guides for connoisseurs and dealers to help distinguish the style, iconography and materials of one community as distinct from another. For example, the community or region, such as Port Harrison/Inoucdjouac (Inukjuak) or Rankin Inlet/Kangiqliniq served as an organizing principle for both exhibition and catalogue (Blodgett et al. 1977; Selby et al. 1981). As noted by then WAG curator Jean Blodgett in 1977, for the Port Harrison exhibition catalogue: The impetus for exhibitions of community based arts flows from the introduction of Eskimo Art to a southern audience in the 1950s. From organizing principle to causal explanation, the region exerts a determining influence on style. Regional stylistic continuities are found as a result of the flavour and texture of local stone, the shared experiences in the context of a particularly forceful art adviser, or a media-based practice. More typically in art historical approaches to Inuit Art, the methodology integrates the influences exerted by communities and the special artistic abilities of individual artists in discussions of style (Hessel and Routledge 1993). The mother and child sculptures from Salluit in the 1950s, …