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This chapter discusses the importance of landscape painting in the formation of early twentieth-century Canadian national identity, in particular the Theosophical aspirations and quest for the genius loci of the Group of Seven painters in Ontario, and Emily Carr in British Columbia. Jeff Wall’s published texts that describe the influence of Carr on his peers’ work, and their desire to work outside of the problematic of colonialism, necessitates this examination. Historian Lorenzo Veracini’s discussions of the many narratives utilized by settler colonial societies to authenticate and rationalize their rights to indigenous land are introduced in relationship to the discursive framing of texts that supported and documented Lawren Harris and Carr’s paintings. The national and regional legacy of spiritually-infused landscape painting was antithetical to young artists and intellectuals like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who came to maturity in the late 1960s, and who were committed to revealing man’s alienation from his industrial environment through Marxist-informed critiques of capitalism.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the visual and textual manifestations of language were significant parts of art practices aligned with feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the work three artists Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly who deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. The artwork Piper, Spero, and Kelly composed during this period of historical upheaval is rich, complicated, and dense. It creates visual and textual worlds that reflect feminism's wide, disparate, and contested reach as well as the serious interventions demanded by the sign woman and the narrow range of appearances and meanings assigned to it by a dominant visual culture that prioritises masculinity.

Upon first looking at Codex Artaud, it is likely viewers' eyes are drawn to the small figures dispersed throughout the vast empty spaces of the artwork. Nancy Spero painted these figures in gouaches of copper, brown, grey, and gold. This chapter analyses a letter Spero wrote to Lippard that attests to the galvanising power of this recognition and then returns to Codex Artaud, Codex Artaud VIII and IX specifically, which re-present Artaud's aggressive and desperate correspondence with his editor. The tongue is a primary visual refrain in Codex Artaud. Codex Artaud I explores the themes encapsulated by the tongue. Spero's thematisation of protest is clear in Codex Artaud III. An image in Codex Artaud III dramaticises the poles of strength and victimisation that Artaud lived out in his writing. Spero's sculpture Mummified is a portrait of a woman without the language to identify repressive feminine ideals.

The international and local feminist avant-garde of the 1970s is discussed in Chapter 6. Vancouver women’s rejection of canonical art history, their development of alternative distribution and exhibition systems for promoting artwork, and their psychoanalytic critique of the male gaze all implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the theoretical and historical project of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. These threats would thus be selectively integrated into the new male-authored photography. Historical and contemporary critical responses to Marian Penner Bancroft and Liz Magor’s work are also analysed, which through contrary-example further establishes the male-gendered character of avant-garde discourse formation in Vancouver.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the feminist stakes of women artists in the United States and Britain. It analyses how three artists, Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly, worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. The book focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It also traces how Solanas deploys language as a weapon capable of 'cutting up' patriarchal authority. The book shows how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into sharp relief. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss.

Vancouver artists’ concerns with discourses of theatricality and female gendered spaces are argued as important links between the defeatured landscapes of the 1968-1971 period and the development of large narrative photographs after 1975. The importance of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to this historical thread are covered in detail, including the documented impact of his work Étant donnés: 1. La chute d/eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946-66) on Jeff Wall’s transition towards the tableau format. Using Étant donnés as a fruitful formal and conceptual segue, the feminist content in several of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s works from the mid-to-late 1970s are analysed. This demonstrates how both artists actively integrated feminist theory and ideas into their visual work, even as they directed critical attention away from it by instead stressing their works relationship the history of European avant-garde critique within modernism.

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