Nunavut: The Land of the Inuit Art
...aribou could now carve a caribou out of stone or bone and sell it to buy food. The heyday of the “Art Era“ came in the 1970s and early 1980s. One of the Inuit artist, Pitsiulak commented on the period: "It was something like the gold rush... Everybody was carving and getting a lot of money for it." The commercialized art helped many people to find jobs again and brought certain stability to a number of problematic communities. The prominent Inuit artists started to make big sculptures and prints that were sold in the galleries throughout the whole world, but even the less-talented “artist“ could produce artifacts for sale. This fact caused a great boom among the Inuit. Many people became involved in the “art industry“, but the supply soon surmounted the demand and a lot of artist were jobless again; the “happier“ ones continued with the struggle to sell their products for lower prices. The Nunavut territory that had originally been part of the Northwest Territories was home for many Inuit artists. Their effort to discover a new means of expressing their “northern“ identity gave rise to a good deal of beautiful art objects. Their works mostly depict animals, hunters, mythological figures and spirits, or magico-religious scenes such as shamanic transformations. The art contributed to the development of the unique Inuit cultural manifestation, on the other hand the quantity of the production allowed the occurence of carvings and sculptures of inferior quality and of a rather souvenir character. The mass production succeeded in satisfying the majority of the world´s demand and it threatened the position of the fine-art artists who were pushed into a very difficult position. Their products had to fight against the cheaper goods, although the quality was absolutely incomparable. The worst period came during the late 1980s when the galleries in the “south“ as Inuits would say were overstocked with the works from the “Eskimo“ artists. The native inhabitants of the Arctic had to find some different source of income. Next to the art production the other three major branches of the Nunavut´s economy are the fishing industry, the tourism and the mining. Despite these four economic pillars the unemployment stays a big problem even today. Prior to Houston´s show in 1950 the art objects originally served for utilitarian purposes. Sandy Cline says that the Inuit “had no tradition of art among themselves, at least not in a European sense.“ The instruments of daily use were decorated with a variety of symbols and mythological scenes. Harpoons would be ornamented with animals and their spirits; shamanistic objects such as drums were adorned with scenes of magic transformations, helping spirits and indwellers; combs and lamps had been beautified with less meaningful ornamentation. The concept of art did not begin to arise until it was understood that carvings could be exchanged for goods. The arrival of the christian missionaries and other Quallunaat, the White, in the 19th century triggered the gradual change in the perception of the art objects. The Euroamerican influence had started to penetrate the traditional culture even earlier, but the christian interference accelerated the process of the traditional culture dissolvement. The system of religious beliefs was shattered the first. The animistic religion based on the shamanism had to face challenges of the christianity. The taboo complex reaching into every aspect of life became a partner of the ten commandments that represented christian “taboo“ system which should be obeyed otherwise the god´s goodwill might have been lost and the help of the community´s religious expert (shaman) had to be sought. Christian priests slowly replaced the Inuit shamans, but they could never erase the power of faith in the “proffessional ecstatics“ as Mircea Eliade calls them in his famous work Šamanismus a nejstarší techniky extáze . The strenght of the religious world has found its expression in the works of the artists. They started to carve out not only the shamans, but also their magic transformation into the spirits and animals. The supernatural beings such as the indweller in the sea – the most famous Inuit “goddess“ Sedna – has become another typical subject of numerous works. She has been portrayed as an adult women or girl over and over in different appearance. The amount of her images reflects the regional variation of the Sedna myth. The beauty and the attractivity of the Inuit art stems from the fact, that initially there were no books or any other means of the written transmission of the words and pictures except for the oral tradition which gave rise to a great artistic expression. People must have visualized all the spirits and supe...