library in St. George, bought a small A-frame on the Digdeguash Basin and founded the Digdeguash Documentation Centre. This would be the group's de facto headquarters for the remaining years of their active production. During this time they realized two particularly noteworthy pieces, both collaborative. The first, in 1975, was a poorly documented remake of Hans Haacke's Live Random Airborne Systems (the original from 1967 consisting of photographic documentation of "seagulls retrieving bread thrown on the water"22) at Oven Head, near the Digdeguash Basin, realized by the three core members and inspired by "the unbelievable number of seagulls near the dump."23 The second, from the same year—the artwork mentioned at the beginning of the article, Inside Joke Piece, consisted of an "undocumented series of communications from participant to participant of a single joke, the 'content' of which is still unknown to all those except for the participants."24 When I interviewed Donny Gullison last summer, he said, "we wanted to make a piece that was completely immaterial and unknowable to those not directly involved, that is, those creating the content of the piece, which is to say the person-to-person communication involved...but also for it to be funny, but again only to those involved... nobody else could get the joke because nobody else could hear it..."25 Brenda Haddon also esoterically stated, "it wasn't just the idea of working with immateriality per se so much as it was really working with consciousness itself as our base material."26 So, going beyond mere dematerialization, the Charlotte County group explored the possibilities of what I might qualify as de-manifestationism, integrating not only the renunciation of the material form but also the rejection of the possibility of artistic documentation directly into the structure of the work. Though, as art historian Leah Modigliani states: What is undeniably real about the (Charlotte County group, as well as) many (other) artists and non-artists of this generation is the preoccupation with traversing all boundaries, spatial or otherwise, and transcending geographical, physical, or perceptual limitations. Again and again, (these) artists appear linked by their desire to resist being pinned down, even at times courting the ridiculous in their attempt to do so.27 However, despite any attempts at pinning down that myself or anyone else might be doing now, in retrospect, those involved in the Charlotte County scene in the early seventies did remain, unlike many of their counterparts elsewhere, relatively unbound by "the invisible apron
strings [connected] to the 'real world's' power structures."28 Whether the apron strings were those of the commercial art world and art dealers, or, as was more often the case in Canada, institutions such as art schools and artist-run centres. Nonetheless, be it because of their relative geographic and intellectual isolation, their naïveté, their idealism, or their lack of desire in partaking in the so-called "real art world," by 1976-1977 all the members of the original core group had discontinued their art practices, though Brenda Haddon, continued, à la Lee Lozano, to produce textual documentation of ontological investigations into everyday life— perhaps an extension of her previous forays into Steinerian movement-art displaced into the realm of the imperceptible, or that of the post-corporeal. Laird also continued in his role as art-worker on his self-built compound near Sept-Îles. Oddly enough, all of the original members also suffered from varying degrees of mental illness over the next few decades, and the one-time primary spokesperson of the movement, Donny Gullison, was committed to, and spent the next 20 years at the Restigouche Psychiatric Hospital in Campbellton. So, from our point of view in the 21st century, what was particular about this group, and how does it make their activities interesting enough to write about forty years later? The artists from isolated Charlotte County were limited geographically, and as a consequence, some would say, intellectually, and artistically. The form that their work took was thus, from a certain point of view, especially in hindsight, provincial in character—that is, "characteristic of people from the provinces; not fashionable or sophisticated, or limited in perspective."29 As Terry Smith states in his 1975 article, "The Provincialism Problem": "Provincialism (in contemporary art) appears primarily as an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values. It is not simply the product of a colonialist history; nor is it merely a function of geographic location."30 So, if we are to believe Terry Smith, it is more the attitude of those "in the provinces" that defines their provincialism, rather than their grasp on the short end of the historical or geographical stick. It was, unquestionably, the contingencies of this end of the stick that the Charlotte County group were given, but how they wielded it perhaps saves them somewhat from the label of "pure provincialism." The provincialism exhibited by the members of the group was quite particular, and it is perhaps especially for this reason that they warrant examination in the present day. The members of the Charlotte County group were indeed somehow able to turn the role of ostensible aesthetic subservience around, and, formalizing their attitudes in a manner proper and specific to their context, able to make the disadvantages of their geographic location work in their 69