“Scaling the pinnacle of art”: learning vacations at the Banff School of Fine Arts, 1930s-1950s

“Scaling the pinnacle of art”: learning vacations at the Banff

School of Fine Arts, 1930s-1950s

Karen Wall, Athabasca UniversityPearlAnn Reichwein, University of Alberta

Summer arts courses : “holiday at school”

As an educational / cultural institution, BSFA = tourism generator

As a tourist attraction = holiday with cultural status

public arts education helped to institutionalize landscape art…

…..tourism produced

selected viewpoints on scenery.

• Introduction

BSFA 1930s – 1950s

Were students and instructors in this hybrid setting primarily

(a) (consuming)tourists or (b) (producing) artists, or both?

How did pedagogical practices of

seeing & painting the Park align w/

approaches of tourism and public education?

2. Questions & approach

du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (1997), p. 3

a. “Tourist gaze”…. b. …revised : mobile & multiple

Records of actual experiences & viewpoints: trace selective processes producing the site as commodity for consumption and (re)production [ Circuit of culture model ]

Western landscape tradition & BNP as “administrative coding of space” (Shields)

3. Alberta 1920s-50s: public education, landscape painting and tourism

a. federal government & cultural agencies (NGC, NFB…)b. Provincial government: education extension & tourism

1946: AB Cultural Dev’t Act (Economic Affairs)

Popular taste : landscape painting scenic routes

BSFA: arts & tourism: visual and literal access

JEH MacDonald, Lake O’Hara 1926

a. Instructors, institutions,

markets, audiences

Landscape production reflected

influence of market values

& adapted imported

(British) techniques

4. How they spent their summer holidays

W. Phillips, Valley of the Ten Peaks, 1928

“Location” as pedagogical & promotional resource….with conceptual & aesthetic challenges …..e.g.:

Students should “scale the pinnacle of Art" away from naturalistic landscapes & objective “compulsions of the mountain environment.”

b. Students: as artist/producers

Landscape & tourist iconography: packaging “beauty spots”

Holiday attitudes in a challenging environment

c. as tourists/ consumers

d. as tourist attractions / hybrids

Subjects & objects of picturing

Paradoxical artistic & touristic experiences

5. Conclusion

As the tourism industry expanded, BSFA was actively involved in producing images that entered into the circulation of fine and commercial art, advertising, educational resources and other institutionalized frameworks.

…we argue the importance of placing the BSFA in the macrostructural context of national institutions, economic and aesthetic movements

BUT

important to consider the casual, satirical and idiosyncratic reflections provided by students as they both reiterated and challenged pedagogical discourses and practices…

…interactive processes of cultural production and consumption