The Great Canadian Wasteland.
The Dionne Quintuplets have been
inspiring artists for generations. Notably, Diana Thorneycroft
and
Genevieve Thauvette have recently focused on them. Thorneycroft in particular locates
them within the history of Canada's systematic abuse and exploitation
of children. They cast their shadow over her recent body of work,
standing, appropriately enough, where the Group Of Seven once stood
as the anxious and slightly crazy icons of a de-familiarized Canada.
The Quintuplets, of course, don't need to be made symbolic. Their
upbringing was already a representation, a colossal work of public
art that attempted to articulate the destiny of the nation. This may
seem like a perverse claim, but it is nothing of the sort. Unlike
African fetish objects or The Book of Kells or the Sistine Chapel,
none of which were intended to be experienced as art in anything like the modern
sense of the term, Quintland was specifically designed as a form of
living museum filled with animate artifacts. It was a public exercise in
the art of child rearing designed to demonstrate the most
technologically advanced machinery and theoretically advanced care.
And it was art in both the most ancient and modern sense of the term, operating as
both cathartic image and ritual, exemplum and as aesthetic rival to
reality that blurred any distinction between art and life. From the
point of their birth onward they were inseparable from mediatization
and presented as another distillation of Canadian utopia: A massive
paedophilic fantasy that would presage both Canada's future as one of
the world's leading destinations for child sex tourists and the torturous
world of reality television.
