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Aerobic Justice—Indigenous Law—Feminist Citation Counterculture Positions—Rearviews—Possible Futures Chris Kraus—Bill Murray—Vera Frenkel—Adrian Piper Ivan Illich—Buckminster Fuller—The Motherfuckers VSVSVS—The World Will Always Welcome Lovers
Summer 2015 Contemporary Art & Criticism
126
Alex McLeod August 27th to October 10th
D I V I S I O N G A L L E RY 4 5 E r n est Av e n u e , To ro n to, O N M 6 P 3 M 7 • + 1 ( 6 4 7 ) 3 4 6 - 9 0 8 2 • to ro n to @ g a l e r i e d i v i s i o n . co m
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Table of Contents
1
Predecessors On Writing
Editorial
6
8
Predecessors
Aerobic Justice by Helen Reed
Features
10
Rethinking Aesthetics and Ontology through Indigenous Law: On the work of Val Napoleon and Loretta Todd by Zoe Todd
18
because he loved the people / served the people‌ Counterculture Positions, Inheritance and Leadership by Jesse McKee
26
40
Cornelia Wyngaarden: Heroines by Liz Park
46
Feminist Approaches to Citation by Maiko Tanaka
Predecessors: Linda Rubin, Ruth Maleczech, Andrew James Paterson, Mary Daly, Albert Dumouchel and Yvonne Rainer, Queer Elders, Mary Anne Staniszewski and Mick Wilson, James MacSwain, Red Burns, George Sawchuk, Bill Murray, AA Bronson, May Cutler, Ivan Illich, Derek Jarman, David Antin by Amy Fung, Chris Kraus, Jacob Korczynski, Helena Reckitt, Vera Frenkel, Kegan McFadden, Georgina Jackson, Robin Metcalfe, Reesa Greenberg, Jesse Birch, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Sholem Krishtalka, Randy Lee Cutler, David Senior, Jamie Ross, Steve Kado
Artist Project
52
Rearviews by Danielle St-Amour and Xenia Benivolski with Onyeka Igwe, Amy Lam, Tiziana La Melia, Raymond Boisjoly, Oliver Husain and Mohammad Salemy
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Summer 2015
Book Reviews
Exhibition Reviews 52
Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance by Jon Davies
55
Myfanwy MacLeod: Tell Her Nothing She Tells All by Kyra Kordowski
56
58
68
We Love Lucy By Lilith West God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name By Andrea McGinty
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Following the Ten Commandments by Jessica Evans
Reviews by Tess Edmonson
Possible Futures: What is to be Done? by Pearl Van Geest
59
Krista Belle Stewart: Seraphine, Seraphine by Yaniya Lee
61
Krista Beucking: MATTERS OF FACT by Karina Irvine
62
TEMPERAMENTAL by Ben Portis
64
Eleanor King: Dark Utopian by Henry Adam Svec
65
Eileen Quinlan: Double Charlie by Sabrina Tarasoff
How to Train your Virgin By Wednesday Black
Inventory 70
by VSVSVS
Artefact 72
The World Will Always Welcome Lovers by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Cover Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, 1973, original Village Voice template black and white snapshot, 11.43 cm x 12.7 cm. image © collection of the adrian piper research archive foundation , berlin
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Table of Contents
Amy Malbeuf, Jimmie Durham 1974, 2014, glass crow beads, tarp, rope, wood. Photo: M.N. Hutchinson
CUSTOM MADE Tsitslem te stem te ck’ultens-kuc Curated by Tania Willard
Elizabeth Nutaraluk Aulatjut, Rebecca Belmore, Hannah Claus, Wally Dion, Phil Gray, Maggie Groat, Maureen Gruben, Gabrielle Hill, Ursula Johnson, Merritt Johnson, Brian Jungen, Bev Koski, Amy Malbeuf, Mike MacDonald, Divya Mehra, Peter Morin, Nadia Myre, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Wendy Red Star, Charlene Vickers
More Than Visible Photography, Ecology + Contact Culture in the Salishan Landscape Tslex te sk’ult.s te tmicw Curated by CAUSA Melvin Williams (Mount Currie, British Columbia) Ceremonial Cedar Bark Hat
June 27 to September 12, 2015 465 Victoria Street • 250-377-2400 • kag.bc.ca
Private and Corporate Art Collection Cataloguing Services. MAY 2 – AUGUST 23, 2015 Presented by
mackenzieartgallery.ca MEGAN KALAMAN
CONSULTING
mkc@megankalaman.com • www.megankalaman.com
David Thauberger: Road Trips and Other Diversions is organized and circulated by the Mendel Art Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery and presented in Regina by Information Services Corporation. This project has been made possible in part through a contribution from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage. Image: David Thauberger, At Home, 1983 (detail), screenprint on paper, 55.9 x 38.1 cm. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of Gordon Kushner, 1986.
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Masthead
Editor Amish Morrell Publisher Kate Monro Design Raf Rennie Assistant editor Kari Cwynar Colour management Dave Herr Advertising sales Michael DiRisio Copy editor Holland Gidney Proofreader Jovana Jankovic Volunteer publishing intern Kesa Smith Academic social media intern Samuel Bernier-Cormier Editorial Intern Marina Fathalla Accountant David Burkes C.A. Printer Sonicprint.ca Errata
C is published by C The Visual Arts Foundation Board of Gesta Abols, Katie Bethune-Leamen, Joanne Hames, Kevin Holbeche, Jessica Directors Knox, Robert Mitchell, Gabrielle Moser, Johnson Ngo, Dory Smith, Leila Timmins, Perry Tung, Michael Prokopow National Advisory Board
Ken Aucoin, David Birkenshaw, Michel Blondeau, Nicholas Brown, Jim Drobnick, Barbara Fischer, Kim Fullerton, Magda Gonzalez Mora, Brian Pel, Francine Perinét, Paul Petro
Editorial Advisory
Andrea Fatona Eugenia Kisin Yaniya Lee Maiko Tanaka cheyanne turions
Jen Hutton Rodney LaTourelle Lisa Myers Danielle St-Amour
Honorary Sam Posner Legal Counsel
On page 62 of issue 125, Kevin Madill’s August 1979 (1991) was cropped so that only part of the original image appears. There were a number of factual errors in Anna Tome’s review of Mira Friedlaender’s Half of What’s There at Recess in New York. The artist Bilge Friedlaender was active in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, not the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. She returned to Istanbul in the ‘90s, not in the ‘80s. Contrary to what was written, Mira Friedlander did not use slide film to record the residency at Recess, and the works of Bilge Friedlaender were not sealed off after the residency was finished.
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Summer 2015
27 April – 23 August 2015 Curated by Corinna Ghaznavi Artists featured: Mary Anne Barkhouse, Panya Clark Espinal, John Dickson, Soheila Esfahani, FASTWÜRMS, Martin Golland, Sherri Hay, Kelly Jazvac, Gareth Lichty, Gavin Lynch, Lisa Myers, David Ruben Piqtoukun, Su Rynard, TH&B Presented in collaboration with the National Arts Centre’s Ontario Scene
St. Patrick’s Building Carleton University 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6 (613) 520-2120 cuag.carleton.ca
Martin Golland, What-Not, 2012, oil on canvas, courtesy the artist and Birch Contemporary
I’M NOT MYSELF AT ALL DEIRDRE LOGUE AND ALLYSON MITCHELL CURATED BY SARAH E. K. SMITH 2 May–9 August 2015
Presented with the support of Queen’s University, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and City of Kingston Arts Fund through the Kingston Arts Council.
image: Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, Her’s is Still a Dank Cave: Crawling Towards a Queer Horizon, 2015, HD Video (still), 8:00
Queen’s University 36 University Avenue Kingston ON K7L 3N6 (613) 533.2190 www.agnes.queensu.ca
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Editorial
Predecessors by Amish Morrell Typically a predecessor is someone who has held a position one now holds or aspires to hold. It can describe an identity that is held in place by a set of social conventions or institutional roles, such as the Director of a gallery or the Editor of a magazine, as well as the continuation of a lineage, where one uses the materials and ideas of others as part of their own practice. By making predecessors the theme of this issue, we pose the question of what are the structures that allow there to be predecessors and also consider how we might expose and transcend these forms. To do so, we look to people who exist outside the parameters of social conventions, as well as to innovative individuals who rise above the norm and transform the institutions they work within. Many of the contributors to this issue invoke a dialogue with the teachers, friends, lovers, collaborators, surrogate parents and weird elders who have enriched and influenced their imaginations and careers. For a special section of the magazine, we asked some of our contributors to each write a short text about someone who has shaped their life and work. Sixteen writers have written about individuals from the art world and from culture at large, describing a wide range of influences – some less likely than others – who belong to a critical counterculture that shapes and informs much contemporary art practice. In this issue we also explore some of the larger stakes at play when we think about who are our predecessors. Several writers examine how both writing and art practice can support marginalized forms of knowledge and give voice to experiences that have been excluded. Métis anthropologist and critic Zoe Todd draws upon Indigenous legal theory to provide a critique of the use of Eurocentric philosophical concepts in contemporary art discourse. One of the latent ideas in Todd’s essay is that predecessors, and ideas themselves, are tied to the embodied specificity of places and cultural experiences, challenging the hegemony of abstract universal concepts produced within academic dis-
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ciplines and institutions. Similarly, Maiko Tanaka, in her article on feminist citation, looks at strategic ways of putting other voices forward, such as using one’s position as a proxy for another. She describes citation as a durational exchange, where a written text is a bridge between lived experiences, which I might also argue, invokes the possibility of empathic connection and forms of community. Also in this issue, Liz Park writes about the artist and dedicated long-time member of the Vancouver art community Cornelia Wyngaarden, whose video and installation work uncovers neglected histories, connecting ancient myth with contemporary socio-political realities. Wyngaarden’s work, according to Park, describes feminist subjectivities that are both plural and trans-temporal. Similarly, Jesse McKee writes about film and video documents from the American counterculture of the late ’60s and early ’70s, looking at how these movements came to reject the idea of singular leadership and produced a model of dispersed engagement. McKee also examines Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being Cycle, an artwork from 1975 that included performances where Piper dressed as a young, racially ambiguous male, wore an afro wig and sunglasses and smoked a Tiparillo, making appearances at art openings, movie theatres and other public places where she droned phrases from the journal she has kept since pre-adolescence. McKee aligns this artwork with a general countercultural shift towards a consideration of the self and identity. Describing this performance as a form of revolutionary drag, McKee argues that the movements of the ’60s and ’70s produced a sense of “radical selfhood” characterized by an enduring counterpositionality that continues to unfold with subsequent generations of artists. Elsewhere in this issue, predecessors are identified as written texts. For the artist project, Danielle St-Amour and Xenia Benivolski staged a formal experiment, presenting a third edition of Rearviews, a project where they publish reviews of exhibition reviews. Woven throughout the
magazine’s regular reviews section, Rearviews begins with a review by Onyeka Igwe, of Jon Davies’ review of Performatorium, a festival of queer performance art held in Winnipeg. In turn, Amy Lam reviews Igwe’s review, and Tiziana La Melia reviews Lam’s review. Continuing for six sequential reviews, each text becomes increasingly abstracted from the content of the original, drawing attention to the conventions of the review form itself. By looking backwards, Rearviews uses homage and lineage as the building blocks of a critical practice, providing an apt metaphor for this issue as a whole. As someone who works closely with artists and writers in my role as Editor of this magazine, I am often aware of the range of ways that people draw inspiration from and share commitments with dimensions of experience that lay outside of contemporary art. In conceiving this issue, we were interested exploring the myriad origins of peoples’ critical practices. Asking contributors to write about predecessors was a way of identifying contexts and relationships that aren’t always visible in the public presentation of artwork and art writing. In some instances, we asked people we might ordinarily think of as our predecessors, who are their predecessors? Through these exchanges, a dialogue takes place, and a complex scaffold around contemporary practices and ideas becomes visible.
Summer 2015
Through a Window: Visual Art and SFU 1965-2015 JUN 3 – JUL 31, 2015 SFU Gallery JUN 3 – AUG 1, 2015 Audain Gallery JUN 3, 2015 – APR 30, 2016 Teck Gallery Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Lorna Brown, Kati Campbell, Allyson Clay, Stephen Collis, Brady Cranfield, Sara Diamond, Christos Dikeakos, Olivia Dunbar, James Felter, Rodney Graham, Keith Higgins, Julian Hou, Vishal Jugdeo, Paul Kajander, Owen Kydd, Tiziana La Melia, Laiwan, Irene Loughlin, Ken Lum, Didier Morelli, Michael Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Elspeth Pratt, Judy Radul, Anne Ramsden, Nicole Raufeisen and Ryan Witt, Lisa Robertson and Kathy Slade, Gabriel Saloman, Carol Sawyer, Greg Snider, Reece Terris, Althea Thauberger, Stephen Waddell, Jeff Wall, Jin-me Yoon and Elizabeth Vander Zaag
SFU GALLERY
TECK GALLERY
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SFU Harbour Centre 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC, V6B 5K3
TUE - FRI / 12 – 5PM 778.782.4266
AU DAIN GALLERY SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts 149 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC, V6B 1H4 TUE – SAT / 12 – 5PM 778.782.9102
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IM AG E S a b i n e Bit t e r/ H e l m u t W e b e r,
T h e Te m p l e t o n Fiv e Af f a i r, M a r c h 1967, 2010 (d e t a i l), i n s t a l l a t i o n. I m a g e c o u r t e s y t h e a r t i s t s.
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On Writing
Aerobic Justice by Helen Reed There is a new photograph on the employeeof-the-month board at the South Arm Community Centre. It features a woman wearing a black lace dress through which bright pink running shorts are visible. She is standing directly overtop something white – canvas or cloth – stained with dribbles of red liquid. Her right arm is stretched to the sky holding a long silver sword. Her left elbow rests on her knee. Triangle pose. She is surrounded by a circle of fine white granules, probably salt – a box of Morton’s lies just outside this powder perimeter. The ground looks dusty and dry, and there is a chainlink fence in the background. The environment appears to be a baseball diamond or some other kind of playing field. But what sport is this? The Ease into Fitness class is busy today – about 30 seniors fill the multipurpose room. The attire of this group is decidedly different than the snug tanktops and stretch pants of Cardio Blast! or Butt Burners. These mature athletes wear loose-fitting sweats and slacks, old vacation T-shirts and white Reebok trainers. One side of the room is lined with peach, purple and grey yoga balls while the windows of the other side look out onto the parking lot. A mirror covers the entire front wall. Before Margaret, the instructor, arrives, there’s body talk. Deb recently pulled a muscle in her calf. Doug cut his leg unloading the dishwasher. Kelly is still recovering from her shoulder injury. Laina has had a mole removed. All attention turns to the front when the music starts and Margaret demonstrates each exercise, with several variations. After a few easy warmups, “Mustang Sally” signals the beginning of cardio.
floor while pulling his knees up to almost figure of Lady Justice from the statue at waist level, pumping his arms for moment- the courthouse – sword, scales and a red um. After three sets, he’s breaking a sweat scarf covering her eyes. But, unlike these and thankful to work a new muscle group more formal appearances, this Lady J dons in the next exercise: toe taps. well-worn sneakers and holds an unusual pose for a goddess – hands and feet on an Tapping side to side now. exercise mat, head, chest, stomach and Lean and tap your toe. thighs all pressed up towards the ceiling, First set. Lean and tap, 4-5-6-7-8. with her sword resting evenly on her belly. And march on the spot again. Keep those Scanning the room, others in the class legs moving. appear unfazed by this change in leader Second set. Add some arms. Straight arms, ship. All of the women and the few men in bendy arms, wiggly arms, any arms at all! the class are enacting Lady J’s exercises 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. with various adaptations. Some have their ankles propped up on chairs, others use a The Jackson 5 is playing and Deb is yoga block under their lower backs. And grooving. She’s substituted the resting like Lady Justice, each one balances their march in between sets with a turn, wig- own double-edged sword. An old hockey gling her arms as she spins around. The stick rests precariously on Doug’s stomnext set has the group moving together ach while he pushes his hips to the sky, across the room like a square dance. Laina has a jenga stack of prescription medication that is teetering on her pelvis, Marching forward for 8. and Deb is struggling to lift off of the mat And backwards for 8. To the front mirror – as her two-year-old grandchild straddles 3-4-5-6-7-clap. her middle. Although Justice is blindfoldAnd backwards now. ed, she knows that Doug’s knees are slightAnd to the side wall – 3-4-5-6-7-clap. ly splayed out to the side and that Laina’s And back. And if you are up to it, replace shoulder blades need to be drawn closer the clap with a hop. together. She offers these balances. And if you want to challenge yourself even Jill takes her place on an exercise mat, more, move up to level 3! Level 3– march best to let the oxygen flow back up to her forward and shoot a basketball. March brain. She pushed too hard during the back and touch the floor. aerobic workout, with the unusual conLet’s go! sequence of finding herself at a kind of ritual; the kind of ritual that also targets It’s been a while since Jill has been to the lower back and gluteus muscles. She the gym, but she’s feeling high from the came to the class with the goal of buildendorphins, and she wants to go for the ing enough strength to carry the kitty Level 3 challenge. She marches forward litter bag home from the grocery store, to do an imaginary lay-up, then back to but now she wonders what other kinds of touch her fingertips to the floor. And again. transformations could take place in the On the third set, she pulls her head up multipurpose room. Are you ready? Here comes another one! too quickly from the ground. White and Helen Reed is a Vancouver-based artist. She self1-2-3- lift your knees. grey blotches wash in from the periphery publishes a zine of fan fiction for contemporary art called Art Criticism & Other Short Stories. These of her vision. A headrush, she assumes. compilations feature short fiction by artists and writJill arrives a little late. She finds a spot She hangs onto the wall for stability and ers that enact speculative and playful relationships towards art works. AC&oSS has featured writing by near the windows and joins in for the sec- waits for her cardio fog to clear. Maya Suess on Kent Monkman, Darren O’Donnell ond set of knee lifts. She has a good view of Looking towards the front mirror, th- on Thomas Hirschhorn and Amber Dawn on Louise Aerobic Justice, featuring artist Margaret Doug in the front mirror; he looks ecstat- rough her fuzzy view, it looks to Jill as if Nevelson. Dragu, is an excerpt of a longer work-in-progress ic, yet arrhythmic, in this movement. He a new instructor has taken control of the that explores the intersections of fitness practices spreads his legs wide and sinks low to the fitness class. She recognizes the familiar and performance art through sports fiction.
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On Writing
Portrait of Margaret Dragu from employee-of-the-month board at the South Arm Community Centre, Richmond BC. photo: shawna dempsey
cmagazine 126
Summer 2015
10
Rethinking Aesthetics and Ontology through Indigenous Law: On the work of Val Napoleon and Loretta Todd
by Zoe Todd
Indigenous legal orders, and the ways they are articulated and enacted – including art – are a focus of some of the most exciting and timely research and theory happening in North America at the moment. How we rebuild our legal orders, as Indigenous peoples in territories throughout Canada, necessitates that we engage fully with our stories, our communities and the lands we inhabit. As an anthropologist, this engagement has become even more important to me because the Euro-Western academy is currently captivated by relationships to the other-than-human, the ontological and the cosmopolitical. As an Indigenous feminist, I feel a need to indigenize these Euro-Western narratives through the stories that scholars and artists like Val Napoleon and my Aunt Loretta Todd have shared with me through their own work. To me, Indigenous legal orders, and the stories that inform and enliven them, have much to teach all of us about what it means to engage with land, animals and other humans in accountable ways. This legal-governance discourse informs the decolonization project ongoing within North America. In my own work as an Indigenous researcher, writer and artist, I seek to understand what it means to rebuild a Métis Indigenous legal order through my relationships to land, to family, to mentors and teachers; I engage this study through stories. As an urban Métis person, I have often struggled to find my elders and mentors within the sprawl and noise of my prairie city. Furthermore, as an Indigenous scholar studying in the heart of a deeply colonial Empire – Britain – and within the colonial discipline of anthropology, I have struggled to assert my own Indigenous thinking within the colonial structures of the academy. But through family, stories, and the broader community, I have been lucky to find women to look up to. Two of the biggest intellectual and artistic influencers in my life are my aunt, Métis filmmaker Loretta Todd, and Indigenous legal theorist Val Napoleon, who is member of the Saulteau First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in northern British Columbia and is an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitksan) House of Luuxhon, Ganada (Frog) Clan, as well as holding a PhD from the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. One of my earliest memories is a summer when my Aunt Loretta was visiting us. She was in Edmonton to make a film, one of many she has crafted in her amazing career. I had some sense of what filmmaking meant, because at the time my mom was a radio journalist working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Video cameras, control rooms, mics and editing were nothing new to me. But what I did not realize, tiny as I was, was that my Aunt was forging an important path for Métis women in the 1990s and beyond. It would be many years later – once I was in university – that I would realize how much of an impact my aunt had had on Indigenous women and filmmakers around the world. I still remember a moment from my undergraduate studies when a professor’s eyes widened in delight when they heard that Loretta was my aunt. Over the years, people have shared their experiences of watching her films for the first time, or of reading articles about her life and story. It is hard to root myself in place as a Métis person, when the government is intent on denying our distinct peoplehood or histories. Having my aunt to look up to, though, gave me a sense of purpose as an Indigenous woman. If I could not firmly root
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Predecessors
myself in the homeland of my Red River Métis ancestors – diasporic as we were – I could root myself in the interplay of colour and sound, story and meaning she employed in her films. Stories and art have been a foundational part of my life, not only as a Métis woman but also as the daughter of a non-Indigenous journalist and a Métis painter. I learned about the importance of a good story through the pieces my mom, Cheryl Croucher, put together for the cbc and later in her work as a freelance writer, journalist and producer. And my dad, painter Garry Todd, can hold a room in his thrall as he tells stories of his grandmother, Caroline LaFramboise, and her role as the charismatic Métis matriarch of the Todd family in the 1950s and 1960s in Edmonton’s Rossdale Flats (pehonan). Many of these stories are channelled into his paintings through his use of rich colours and palettes that echo the heart-aching skies and fields and forests of my prairie home. It never occurred to me, though, that stories and skies and land and Métis histories were a mode of thinking, or were art or law that could stand alongside the Euro-Western philosophies and artistic oeuvres in which my non-Indigenous peers were immersing themselves at school. However, once I began graduate school, I began to question the primarily Eurocentric narratives and methodologies open to us for inquiry. I was tired of seeing Indigenous art and the work of Indigenous thinkers relegated to “craft” and “myth” and temporally marginalized as belonging to a distant and fading past. Through reading the work of anthropologists Julie Cruikshank and Ann Fienup-Riordan, however, I realized that story is itself a present and active mode of inquiry, one that anthropology – despite its failings and coloniality – makes room for. And this is where I returned, in a serious way, to the centrality of stories in my own upbringing as an urban Métis woman. Stories and art are tools that Val Napoleon employs in her ground-breaking work as the Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Justice and Governance and lead of the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Considered a leading thinker on Indigenous legal orders and law in North America, Val was a community activist for many years before she became an academic. Her advocacy encompassed work throughout the period of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (in the 1990s, the Delgamuukw sued the provincial government for rights to unceded territories in northwestern British Columbia, a case famous in anthropological circles for the original trial judge’s dismissal of oral history evidence 1). In a recent interview, Val explained that she went to law school once her first grandchild was born: I wanted to be able to say something like: if you want to do something, you have to go and do it,” and then I realized that I hadn’t done that, I hadn’t walked the talk. Because I had applied to go to law school when I was 21 or 22 – I was accepted – but I didn’t go. Life happened and I just didn’t go. So I thought, well, that was something I wanted to do and I have to walk the talk. As an Indigenous woman and a community activist, Val wanted to ensure that women were well represented within the spaces where decisions were
cmagazine 126 1 See Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, [1997] 3 S.C.R. 1010. [https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/ item/1569/index.do] and Ridington, Robin, "Fieldwork in Courtroom 53: A Witness to Delgamuukw v. BC", in BC Studies (No. 95, pp. 12-24).
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Predecessors
being made. Her motivations to study law were thus rooted in the Indigenous feminism that informs her work today: I was a community activist. I saw older women disappear around me and that phenomenon didn’t happen with men as they aged. And law is an important language. Not just Canadian law, but law—Indigenous law, other laws around the world—is a way of thinking and a way of operating and making decisions. At the heart of Val’s work is an assertion that Indigenous laws are neither fragile nor incommensurable with state laws, but rather a set of living and dynamic processes with which Indigenous peoples must actively engage and mobilize within our communities and nations. This engagement is not easy; as she says, you have to do the work. So, what is Indigenous law, for those who are not familiar with this work? Through her work, Val demonstrates that Indigenous law is dynamic, alive, robust and integral to the assertion of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty in Canada. It is also, as Val points out, a set of processes that require constant intellectual engagement. It allows Indigenous peoples to tackle complex internal community issues as well, from how to address intersections of violence and gender to the management of watersheds and lands in the context of extractive economies. It is the set of processes through which Indigenous peoples actively engage and shape the world. Indigenous legal orders “describe law that is embedded in social, political, economic, and spiritual institutions,” as Val writes in a 2007 paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance.2 It is from reading and engaging with Val’s work and the work of other Indigenous legal scholars that I have come to prefer to use Indigenous legal orders in my own work over the far trendier Eurocentric notion of ontology (so common in anthropology and art scholarship at the moment). As Val’s work teaches me, Indigenous legal orders centre action and engagement and unambiguous confrontation with colonial realities rather than simply acknowledging that other ways of being exist. Legal orders place the onus on an active engagement across difference and sameness rather than just describing difference or alterity. As Val articulates, “law is a verb.” Indigenous law is also, as Val asserts, a tool for working across legal orders, to engage respectfully between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. In my studies, I was drawn to Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald’s pedagogical work on “ethical relationality” and Indigenous Métissage 3 because he makes space to work across and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and political and economic realities. I was drawn to Val’s work primarily because she does not shy away from the difficult questions of how to address the colonial logics and divides between Indigenous and non-Indigenous institutions and processes in Canada. Instead, she urges those of us reading her work to lean into the discomfort and work of rebuilding and activating our legal orders and confronting the paradoxes that confound many thinkers engaging with the task of rebuilding the legal orders that colonialism tried to deny. I first met Val during my Master’s degree at the University of Alberta. I was working in a non-Indigenous department, and struggling to root my work in
cmagazine 126 2 Val Napoleon, Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders (2007: National Centre for First Nations Governance), p. 2. http://fngovernance.org/ncfng_research/val_napoleon.pdf Accessed April 14, 2015.
13 3 Dwayne Donald, “Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts”, in First Nations Perspectives 2(1), 2009: pp. 1–24.
Predecessors
Production stills from SKYE & CHANG , television drama series written and directed by Loretta Todd, 2012. Produced by Qubefilm, Vancouver. images courtesy of loretta todd
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Indigenous thinking. At a 2009 meeting arranged by the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and the National Centre for First Nations Governance, I first heard Val present her work on Indigenous legal orders. Her words stuck. I was no longer a Métis student passively or hopelessly stuck in a non-Indigenous pedagogy; I was an active agent who had a duty to work with Indigenous legal orders as living and present realities articulated through people’s stories and lives. This realization deeply informs my own work. Long before I struggled with the academy, however, my aunt was already directly confronting the similarities and differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and artistic practices. My aunt was the first person in my family to go to university. Much like Val, my aunt went to post-secondary school later on in life, once she had worked for many years in community projects. She grew up in Edmonton but left home at 13, as she was “in a hurry to grow up.” She moved to Vancouver, and was pregnant with her daughter, Kamala, at age 14. She worked different jobs to support herself, and began volunteering at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society and then working for the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (ubcic). It was at ubcic that she was deeply impacted by the advocacy and thinking of George Manuel. With the experience of learning from influential activists and leaders of the time, and with many years of work in community projects throughout northwest coastal communities, she went to Simon Fraser University to study film. At that time, she points out, sfu film studies was very experimental: The thing about Simon Fraser was that you had to study art history, you had to study political history. So there was a lot of discussion around the meaning of art, the history of art, but always within a Western tradition. But they were radical enough that they were also recognizing that all those Western traditions were borrowing from other cultural traditions. And I had a couple of really good professors who were very encouraging, and I found myself really excelling at theory. Theory doesn’t just begin and end at theory: it takes you into so many realms. Her theoretical training and her years of community practice weave together in a number of politically and intellectually informed works that explore the “many realms” to which she alludes: from education and residential schools in The Learning Path (1991), to Indigenous women artists in Hands of History (1994), to the stories of Indigenous war veterans in Forgotten Warriors (1997). Art and stories blend into both Val and my aunt’s work. While we are conditioned to view law as aseptic and sterile in Euro-Western contexts, the relationship between law and aesthetics and the sharing of stories in oral, visual and embodied forms is intimate. Through the use of graphic novels, posters and her own artwork in her research, Val demonstrates that Indigenous legal orders can be shared and understood through visual and aesthetic means. A brochure published for the Indigenous Law Research Unit features Val’s Kokum Raven Series paintings.4 The series features the Raven in a collection of playful contexts: sitting on top of a copy of Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian; riding an Indian brand motorcycle; flying in the sky with kerchiefs; wearing a
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Predecessors 4 http://www.indigenousbar.ca/indigenouslaw/ wp-content/uploads/2013/04/AJR_Brochure. pdf
set of headphones; sitting with a friend wearing a delicate string of pearls. Val explains the visual use of the Raven in the brochure: Indigenous law is in the world and there are many ways to learn about it, teach it, and to represent it. The way I have chosen here is with the raven – a trickster for some Indigenous peoples. She can teach us by being a troublemaker and by upsetting the log jams of unquestioned assumptions. She can also teach us with love, patience, and a wicked sense of humour. She can create spaces for conversations and questions – that is her job as a trickster and a feminist so that nothing is taken for granted and all interpretations are laid bare. In my aunt’s Cree TV language series, Tansi! Nehiyawetan, the opening credits feature an animation of a raven flying over an urban landscape, to explicitly honour the West Coast territory within which the Plains Cree language show is filmed. The raven features here, too, as a teacher and a guide welcoming viewers to enter the realm of nehiyawewin (Plains Cree) language. And my aunt’s film work is, in some ways, explicitly an extension of the realm of storytelling and aesthetic traditions she grew up with as a young woman in Alberta. Whenever I have the chance, I relish sitting with this gifted storyteller over a cup of tea to listen to stories from her childhood or her illustrious career, which has taken her from waitressing to behind the camera, to classrooms, to the United Nations, to community gatherings. I like hearing her tell a joke or a story – the distinct shift of tone in her voice to share a funny anecdote from her travels and work is familiar and treasured to me. And I can see the fingerprint of her sense of aesthetics and humour and social justice within every piece she writes, directs or produces. Val translates stories into legal action, processes, art and living text. My aunt translates stories into shadow and light and sound. In a story featured in a 2002 article written by Jason Silverman, a version of which my aunt shared with me recently when I interviewed her for this piece, her first encounter with filmmaking as form was on a blizzarding Edmonton night when she was a child. As she watched over her siblings in a non-descript motel on the outskirts of Edmonton while my grandmother dealt with a family crisis, my aunt found herself watching an old horror film flickering across the TV. She lay there motionless, frozen by the imagery on the screen and the coldness of the draughty room. But something outside caught her attention, and she moved to the window where the clouds had lifted and the prairie moon was shining down on the earth. In that moment, she saw the imagery of the film reflected on the window, and it was in that instant, she says, that she understood film to be the interplay of shadow and light. Many years later, this moment would deeply inform her transformation of stories to screen. Much as Val urges her interlocutors to engage in the active process of rebuilding Indigenous legal orders, my aunt actively engages with Indigenous stories as a mutable, dynamic and rooted medium. In fact, confronting and confounding assumptions about Indigenous pasts, presents and futures is one of my aunt’s specialties. In her 2014 sci-fi action pilot, Skye & Chang, my aunt
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directly engages Indigenous futurisms and Indigenous feminism through science fiction. In an early film school project, she filmed neon light in Vancouver at different speeds, imagining and re-creating the worlds her father and uncles would have inhabited in their time on the skids in downtown Edmonton in the 1950s and 1960s. In an upcoming project, she explores the relationships between Western science and Indigenous stories. The work of both my aunt and Val is monumental, and the stories continue to flow. As Val explained in our recent interview:
For my aunt’s part, she continues to develop new projects. When one’s business is reasserting Indigenous laws, stories, art and thinking, the work is never done. But it is hard work that is worth engaging, because it is literally re-shaping the face of Canada. I, for one, am forever grateful to these two women for their tireless devotion to their craft. Through their work, scholars and artists like me have access to art, stories and law that ground a rich and dynamic Indigenous intellectual praxis in Canada. In order to decolonize the academy and the art world, we must draw upon our own thinking, art and provocations. Many of us have filtered our words, stories and aesthetics through the measures and metrics of the Euro-Western academy for a very long time, because these are the rubrics the academy enforces. We, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and artists alike, tend to cite non-Indigenous thinkers before Indigenous ones because the currency of words within the academy demands it. This is something that Sara Ahmed critiques in her work on the politics of citation as a “citational relational” 5 that privileges mostly the voices of white, male actors, and which she describes “as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.” 6 Thinking with Ahmed’s work, I argue that in dealing with Indigenous ontologies, citation is also a resuscitation 7 of specific ways of framing legal orders and cosmologies themselves. As an Indigenous feminist, I seek through my work to revive and enliven the thinkers and worlds that honour and acknowledge the lives, laws and language of Indigenous peoples as distinct and concrete intellectual traditions in Canada. It is exciting to engage with work that does not need the old citational or Eurocentric paradigms in order to assert its vision. I am eager to see the worlds that are brought to life through an Indigenous praxis in Canada, and excited by how the reciprocal relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinking and art are steering us in new directions through rich and provocative stories and aesthetics.
Zoe Todd (Métis) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in the Treaty Six Area of Alberta, Canada. She writes about Indigeneity, art, architecture, decolonization and healing in urban contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in northern Canada. Her art practice incorporates writing, spoken word, beading, drawing and film to tell stories about being Métis on the Prairies. She is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and is a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar. In July 2015, she will take up a position as a Lecturer in Anthropology at Carleton University.
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5 Sara Ahmed (2014). “White Men.” Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys. com/2014/11/04/white-men/
Predecessors 6 Sara Ahmed (2013). “Making Feminist Points.” Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
7 Wren Gayle Romano also explores resuscitation and citations in her writing on “encitation.” See http://winterkoninkje.dreamwidth.org/ 98668.html.
I receive requests every week from different Indigenous peoples – communities and Tribal Councils… So what is amazing, what is magic is when people say things like “I’ve heard these stories all my life and now I see the law in them and now I see legal principles everywhere.” So these are everyday people who don’t have university education, who are taking the stories and learning from them and applying them to things that they have to deal with today, the very real and hard challenges that they have.
18
because he loved the people / served the people‌ Counterculture Positions, Inheritance and Leadership
by Jesse McKee
This winter, I organized a day-long forum for Vancouver’s During this time, some feminist groups in the US prevented Presentation House Gallery called Countercultures Forum anyone from becoming a leader and anyone who self-identhat took stock of its recent exhibitions programme – tified as such was silenced and psychologically tortured. from the Dollarton Pleasure Faire photographs of Bruce Behind this practice were anti-authoritarian aspirations. Stewart, to an exhibition on the psychedelic underground In the face of today’s anti-globalization, ecological and proin Soviet Estonia, to Allen Ginsberg’s photographic beat democracy movements, Hardt argues that we are at an imgeneration anthology and Michael Turner and Allison passe with our current models of leaderless movements.2 Collins’ survey of the infamous East Vancouver collective In looking at the movements from the ’60s and ’70s, could The Mainstreeters. In looking at these activities, and many we imagine leaders once more being elected in their own other moments of activity from the ’60s and ’70s, we would fashion, and beyond that, celebrated? And would today’s usually describe them as being counterpoints, using this movements and groups even allow for such leadership word to suggest a position against or contrary to the main- models? It’s not an accidental move towards this horizontality. stream. But mainstream meant something then that it no longer means now. Of course, at the eclipse of capitalism It’s significant as a societal shift, where we yearn to behave and during an embodied electronic lifestyle stage of history, democratically, even within the movements themselves. the idea of withdrawal from the mainstream, and being Part of me agrees with Hardt when he says we should able to stand with your back to something, seems nearly know better than to really want this, since the notion of democracy has been so corrupted and altered at this impossible to most. As I was assembling a screening for the forum, com- point in history. An honest left position is truly cynical prised of archival recordings and artworks from the ’60s about democracy, as a way to protect a nucleus of hope and ’70s, I kept two thinkers in mind through which I that something good might emerge in the world. On the thought we could read the activities depicted. Firstly, I other hand, this is not to say that powerful horizontal thought of British philosopher Howard Caygill, whose most movements from earlier years and decades have not had recent book, On Resistance, looks at the joy and pleasures impacts, but they have not created lasting social transforof resistance – from Rosa Luxemburg to Tahrir Square. mation. When we find a leader akin to one of those from Through his readings of many historic and current models the models of the past, can we again find wider legitimacy of resistance, Caygill determines that the most substantial and efficacy for the movements we want to see succeed outcomes of movements might not actually be the goals today? All of the leaders from this earlier period are either they sought to achive. That’s not to say that movements still behind bars or buried underground. And we have not do not achieve the changes they are seeking in some cir- found workable models to succeed them or this style of cumstances, but broad, lasting change in the direction of working. Perhaps we’re still going through this shift… but the movement’s goal often seems to be lacking. Where it’s taking a hell of a long time. Leaders today are constantCaygill places his attention is with a movement’s ability ly critiqued and torn down from within movements, in this to inspire a capacity to resist. This capacity to resist is search for internal democracy. Leaders today are often recognized by the mainstream culture of the time and is co-opted into a larger system of operation or are rejected also inherited by future generations. Using the Zapatista by the movements themselves. To speak to the content of the images from previous movement as an example, Caygill concludes that the importance of inheriting a capacity to resist is paramount decades screened at the forum, what was presented was a in any movement’s activities. From generation to gener- loose chronology from the mid-’60s to mid-’70s, starting ation, the work of one movement inspires the next. Thus, with Buckminster Fuller addressing a group on the famed it’s important that we look at the period of the ’60s and Hippie Hill at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. This ’70s as a spectrum of positions that we have inherited. And occasion was a sort of emergence and gathering moment in having access to so much more content from this period of early movements: learning from a leader renowned for than ever before – thanks to our electronic lifestyles – this his radical architecture and his lifestyle planning towards visual essay offers a bit of a decompression of the notion the notion of the organic as something that works as a of counter positions within the 1960s and 1970s, at least sustainable self-feeding and self-managing system. This in the US. Consequently, when we recall these moments was followed by a short Newsreel Collective documentary as historic, we recall a whole spectrum of positions that about an action in New York City by the anarchist group include, but are not limited to, communing, acting outwards, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, in which they react to, getting set back, withdrawing, reorienting, reacting once act outwards and against mainstream society during a more, mourning, diffusing and focusing inwards. All of sanitation workers’ strike on the Lower East Side. The these positions are enacted at once when we think of the Motherfuckers gather garbage from the streets and ride countercultures of the time, in hindsight and at large. This the subway to the Upper West Side, where they dump this horizontal view that we now have of history requires us to mess on the steps of the Lincoln Center for the Performing get a bit more detailed and understand how and why this Arts. Next were three pieces of footage from Videofreex, spectrum of engagement with and withdrawal from the a group that initially produced content about growing counterculture movements for the television network cbs, mainstream took place. Secondly, and equally, I kept the recent work of Ameri- but which then went on to run its own free-access unlican political philosopher Michael Hardt in mind when censed television station from a farmhouse in upstate New looking at images of these movements. He considers the York. In the first piece of Videofreex’s footage, a group countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s as a moment of of women is assembled in an arts space in New York for crisis for leaders within leftist movements. He has recog- a women’s liberation meeting called Burning Theatre and nized that the leaders in these movements were created Alternate U. It is a sort of planning meeting and discusand celebrated by the media, and as such were staged as sion period, but the momentum and the direction of what targets for the state. This can account for some of the dis- is going on are very different from the Buckminster Fuller persed or nodal leadership models that started to appear footage. There is no centralized leader nor content delivery; in the 1970s, especially among feminist groups, where instead, it’s a truly dispersed and disoriented experience the practice of leadership trashing started to take place.1 of counterculture. This comes after the general movement
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Director unknown, Buckminster Fuller Meets the Hippies, colour film, 1966 or 1968, 30 min. image courtesy of the estate of r. buckminster fuller
Videofreex, Fred Hampton: Black Panthers in Chicago, 1969, B&W video, 24 min. image courtesy of video data bank, chicago
Videofreex, Fred Hampton: Chant and Demonstration, 1970, B&W video, 4:30 min. image courtesy of video data bank, chicago
Newsreel Collective, Garbage, 1968, film stills, B&W, 10 min. image courtesy of third world newsreel, new york
Videofreex, Women’s Lib Discussion: Burning Theatre and Alternate U, 1970, B&W video, 68:40 min. image courtesy of video data bank, chicago
saw certain setbacks, stalls and delays in achievable out- drag and also as a revolutionary drag. The Mythic Being Cycle comes during the energetic and admittedly optimistic continued to emerge throughout Piper’s practice as a mindperiod of the mid-’60s. Ultimately, there is a sour tone to ful and embodied approach to focusing one’s own position this women’s lib discussion. towards the self and within the self. The footage shown next was an interview with Fred This inheritance of a counterculture spectrum reveals Hampton, a Black Panther party leader in Chicago, conduc- itself ultimately as a narrative that refocused the momented just over a month before he was killed by the Chicago tum of many movements inwards. In actuality, it created police. Here, Hampton speaks directly to the role and a generation, a second generation, a third generation, a responsibilities of a leader as a central figure in a group. fourth generation, and so on, of figures infused with a He speaks about movements superseding their leader and deeply hardwired counter-positionality and radicalism. continuing the momentum of the cause in the face of the But without a leadership, or even the will to elect one, leader’s mortality. Perhaps he was already aware of his where do we focus this positionality, now that we are so status as a marked man by the state. Finally, also from connected in ambition but diffused in action? At this point, Videofreex, we see a clip of a demonstration and a memo- in the early 21st century, the rules are changing away from rial dedicated to Fred Hampton where the crowd engages broad ideological confrontations and towards a denser in a call and response: “…he was shot through the head / network of local connections with unique nodal points while sleeping in his bed / because he loved the people / of opinion and belief. Given this situation, the local intriserved the people…” This footage is symbolic of a general cacies of movements and places will hopefully have more sense of mourning that was felt in the early ’70s towards impactful effects within smaller regions. With this in mind, the state of counterculture and also the notion of leader- some solutions for our countercultural stalemate might ship in general for the left. Let’s not forget that the leaders be found if we start to release some of the radical selfhood of these movements had become targets for the security embodied in each of us, in order to find groups and moveforces of the state. The state saw them as extreme threats, ments with which we can agree and work – if not all the and exercised its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. time, then most of the time. At this point, some of the continuing work of counterculture was to disperse leadership; the momentum became With thanks to Presentation House Gallery for supporting this internalized and refocused inwards, so that each member programme and The Countercultures Forum, which took place on could be a radical representation of the self. March 15, 2015 in Vancouver. I would also like to acknowledge To close the programme, an audio work by the artist several colleagues; Sepake Angiama, Kari Conte, Florence Ostende, Adrian Piper played from her complex system and artwork Lisa Schmidt and Eszter Steierhoffer, with whom I researched and The Mythic Being Cycle (1973). One hears for several minutes presented an earlier but ultimately different screening of some of a voice recording of a repeated and rehearsed phrase, full this footage in Krakow in 2008. of cadence and tonal shifts, and between catching breaths, esse McKee is an independent curator based in Vancouver. Previously he Piper continually affirms: “Within, the eye probes more Jwas the Exhibitions Curator at the Western Front Society (Vancouver) and and more deeply, and its strength of vision is broadened Curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff). His writing has been published and toughened by its external blindness.” This line comes in C Magazine, Fillip and Border Crossings. from the artist’s personal journal, which she has kept since Endnotes pre-adolescence. She uses such phrases as a balancing 1 Michael Hardt, “The Leadership 2 Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Problem”, a public lecture at Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms. mantra, as she performs the role of a man in public space, the European Graduate School, Magazine (April 1976) pp. 49-51, dressed in an afro wig, mustache, and men’s clothing while EGS Media and Communication 92-98. Studies, Saas-Fee Switzerland, smoking cigarettes. She would appear at cinemas and art 2014. openings, while droning these phrases out loud and also while walking down the street in New York. The Mythic Being Cycle also manifested as monthly ads in the Village Voice, ones that comprised an image of Adrian Piper dressed in drag with a speech bubble speaking one of her journal phrases. But the drag look here is twofold, as a gendered
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26
Predecessors
Ruth Maleczech by Chris Kraus
Queer Elders by Kegan McFadden
David Antin by Steve Kado
Andrew James Paterson by Jacob Korczynski
Red Burns by Reesa Greenberg
Derek Jarman by Jamie Ross
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology by Helena Reckitt
Albert Dumouchel and Yvonne Rainer by Vera Frenkel
May Cutler by Randy Lee Cutler
Linda Rubin by Amy Fung Mary Anne Staniszewski and Mick Wilson by Georgina Jackson
George Sawchuk by Jesse Birch Bill Murray by Corrine Fitzpatrick James MacSwain by Robin Metcalfe
Ivan Illich by David Senior AA Bronson by Sholem Krishtalka
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L is for Los Angeles, the setting for his 1986 novel The Disposables. A city full of shadows despite all the sunshine.
K is for Krapp’s Last Tape. In this 1958 one-act play by Samuel Beckett, both the present and the materiality of the medium pull the past out and apart.
J is for juxtaposition. The collisions of collage or the stitching together of timelines. Autofiction obviously, but also poetry of the concrete kind.
I is for image, though it may be cameraless. Cut and paste from the desktop for viewing on your laptop. See C is for colourfield.
H is for Highsmith, Patricia. Ambiguous protagonists, queer subtexts, and the pleasure of both following and forsaking genre. Noir but not.
G is for goth-dirge, giving way to funk, dub and the digital drive. See D is for Derwatt.
F is for fictocriticism as in the magazine work, especially in impulse. If pop is one pole then pulp is the other.
E is for Eno, Brian. The glamour of pop and the interiority of ambient are not antithetical.
D is for Derwatt, Kevin Dowler and Andrew James Paterson. A duo for Generation SoundCloud, but please stay tethered to your headphones. derwatt.bandcamp.com. See G is for goth-dirge.
C is for colourfield, the slide from abstract aesthetics into interior environments. Minimal means and maximal ends, painting post-Internet.
There are books that sit unread on your shelves for years. They seem to belong to another time in your life, reflecting different interests, even a different you. Their presence is almost embarrassing. Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism from 1978 is such a book for me. I read the Women’s Press edition back when I was an undergraduate studying English.1 The male-dominated nature of the college, the curriculum and the faculty left me searching for female allies and mentors. I wasn’t yet participating in the feminist movement, which, in any case, reached its peak when I was a child. But a largely all-girls education and a maternal-dominated household had given me a strong sense of female identity and agency. Encountering Gyn/ Ecology was an unforgettable experience. It emboldened me; it opened my eyes; and it made me feel less alone. Gyn/Ecology exposes the myths that have constrained women and the atrocities that have oppressed them throughout history, from witch burning to female genital mutilation, foot-binding to suttee, Nazi eugenics to western gynecology (a term played on in the title). Moving beyond critique, the book posits a new feminist culture grounded in female relationships and values. This in itself, Daly argues, is a
by Helena Reckitt
The first time I met Ruth Maleczech was on the first day of the inaugural term of the New York Art Theatre Institute. It was January 1979. Ruth had been hired as the primary teacher of acting, joining faculty who would include Valda Setterfield, Vanessa James, Kenneth Koch and Kenward Elmslie. With the exception of Ruth, we’d realize later, these people were personal friends of artistic director and nyati founder Donald Sanders, a sometimes-director and socialite who was probably bankrolling the whole enterprise. The twelve of us nervously filed into an enormous and minimally renovated loft on East 14th Street. We didn’t know what to expect. We were all there to work with Ruth Maleczech, the lead actress with Mabou Mines, a theater company that was enjoying tremendous success with a play called The Shaggy Dog Animation, which had been running for months at New York’s The Public Theater. We’d all seen Ruth in this play. She played Rose the Dog, a sort of a clef narration of her relation to the play’s writer/director Lee Breuer, her husband, with whom she had two young children. Her presence in it, somehow rising above the dense mesh of theatrical concept, special effects and mixed media, was electrifying. In a company of exceptional actors, Ruth was the one that you couldn’t stop watching. She had an odd beauty: long, wavy red hair; gap teeth; deep-set, transparent eyes and a slight frame with large breasts and full hips that she described once as her “peasant body.” “Acting,” she said once, “is my yoga.” Watching her in this play was like watching a Buddhist nun undertake self-immolation in the most controlled way. She sought danger; she was never extravagant. In short, we were terrified. Punctuality was part of the Institute’s ethos. We arrived, as instructed, at nine o'clock and found Ruth waiting behind an old steel teacher’s desk awash in the loft’s empty space. She was wearing a button-down shirt and an old-fashioned, knee-length grey pleated skirt. Was there an apple? It was the first day of school and she was performing herself as the teacher.
A is for Andrew James Paterson, artist, author, critic, curator.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology
by Chris Kraus
by Jacob Korczynski
B is for bit rate, the foundation of our images and sounds passing a point towards post-production. See V is for video.
Ruth Maleczech
JFK got my VHS, PC and XLR web quiz
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Jacob Korczynski is a Toronto-based writer and curator.
Z is for zigzag. Look here, turn there. Thank you, Andrew. We’re still catching up.
Y is for yawp, a harsh cry or foolish talk. A ditty or dialogue. The voice thrown from the body in No Wave nonsense or as medium for Beckett’s black humour.
X is so abstract.
W is for wallpaper music. The environment as invisible and insidious, unannounced and then altered. See E is for Eno.
V is for video. An ever-expanding enveloping all that arrived before it, especially the analogue. See B is for bit rate.
U is for undertone. Subtext or subharmonic.
T is for Toronto. Institutions by artists and artists by institutions. A city full of separations despite all the “communities.”
S is for self-documentary. Colleagues make for cast members but the solitary arts have their privileges.
R is for real-time. As opposed to what? Compression and delay? That’s the new night and day. Delay, relay, today, tomorrow. See J is for juxtaposition.
Q is for queer and the politics of both desire and daily life.
P is for performance, which is not necessarily live. The camera as confidante, face and body first shot and then shaped.
O is for object. Says Derwatt: “Materials actually do matter; some people say they are post-materialist, virtual, but we disagree, quite strongly in fact.”
N is for narrative, but perhaps this can be posited by genre. Says Andrew: “To lose the plot, first there has to be one.”
M is for melodrama. Melody plus drama. return to an earlier matriarchal period, whose rediscovery enables women to unleash the Goddess within, or “female divinity, that is, our Selves.” 2 Daly’s righteous anger, accumulated scholarship and visionary scope enthralled me. “Rage is not a stage,” she wrote in her New Intergalactic Introduction to the 1991 edition. “It is transformative focusing Force that awakens transcendent E-motion. It is my broom, my Fire-breathing, winged mare. It is my spiraling staircase, leading me where I can find my own Kind, unbind my mind.” 3 Her book allowed me to voice my previously inchoate frustration with gender roles and expectations, and my alienation from the subtly oppressive “refinement” of an Oxford University education. Defying mainstream feminist politics, Daly rejected sexual equality, arguing that women should govern men. Her unapologetic misandry was intoxicating. “An act of Dispossesion,” she pronounced her book “absolutely Antiandrocrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.”4 In a later interview she claimed that the Earth required “decontamination,” prophesying, approvingly, the drastic reduction of the male population.5 Beyond its polemical message, Gyn/Ecology’s creative and irreverent style captivated me. Here was a new language for a new kind of woman, one that I might not live up to myself but which offered me an aspirational ego ideal. To expose language’s sexist underpinnings, Daly denatured words, slashed them in two, and returned them to their Latin roots. She coined terms to devise new concepts and to imagine new worlds. Derision and erudition were in equal evidence. A sentence considering female submission to male spirituality contains the audacious passage: “forever pumping our own blood into the Heavenly Head, giving head to the Holy Host, losing our heads.”6 That Daly taught at a conservative Jesuit-run university, Boston College, is hard to believe.7 I found Gyn/Ecology’s separatism its most liberating aspect. Trained to develop the conventional female traits of niceness, popularity and amenability, the prospect of turning against my cultural education was exhilarating. Daly once said, “I don't think about men. I really don't care about them.” 8 By subjecting men to the rejections Chris Kraus is a writer and filmmaker. Her books include I Love Dick (1997), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Video Green (2004), Torper (2006) and Summer of Hate (2012).
She introduced herself by name, vocation and age. She was Ruth Maleczech, 38, a performer. She lived on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village; she had two children named Lute and Clove Galilee. Immediately, through her demeanour and presence, she established an atmosphere of acute but a-personal intimacy. Together with Lee and her other collaborators, she’d arrived at a method of acting that involved speaking her lines while traversing a parallel associative “score.” “Don’t you want to move audiences?” she’d been asked once. “Yes,” she replied. “From one place to another.” For the rest of that term, and the one after, we spent hours watching Ruth think. The class format was for each person to select a monologue and perform it within a score of his or her own devising. During each presentation, our eyes were glued to our fellow student, but what we felt was Ruth watching. When it was finished, she said what she saw, and then she let herself drift to the thoughts that arose from her watching. Her thoughts ranged from the presumptuously personal to the meta-historical. “I teach,” she once said, “so that my past can become part of somebody’s future.” I’ve never taught writing without thinking about her.
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image courtesy of helena reckitt
Cover of 1979 UK edition of Gyn/Ecology
Ibid., p. 29
5 Susan Bridle, “No Man’s Land: An interview with Mary Daly,” EnlightenNext Magazine, Fall– Winter 1999, Accessed at www. enlightennext.org/magazine/j16/ daly.asp?page=1 , 15th April 2015
4
3 Ibid., p. xxxiii
2 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (London, Women’s Press, 1991), p.111
1 The Women’s Press edition appeared a year after US publication, in 1979. Although I first read the book in that edition, the copy that I own, and to which I refer to here, is the 1991 edition that included a new introduction.
Endnotes
8
Bridle, “No Man’s Land.”
7 Daly’s contentious time at Boston College, during which she was denied tenure (a decision that was subsequently overturned), began in 1967. In 1999, she was forced to resign after she refused to allow two male students to attend her women-only seminars, offering them one-on-one tuition instead.
6 Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p.67
Helena Reckitt is Senior Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths College Department of Art, University of London.
and denials they had historically meted out to women, she advocated a radical form of reverse discrimination. In the process, she aimed to release suppressed female subjectivities and power. There are lots of problems with Daly’s book, which seem clear to me now, from its ahistoricism to its white ethnocentrism (the latter critiqued by Audre Lorde in an Open Letter written shortly after publication). Its transphobia and anti-gay-male bias today feel horribly narrow and prescriptive. Daly’s language games now strike me as annoyingly contrived, and her goddess imagery makes me wince. But Gyn/Ecology’s impact cannot be denied. Daly saw her work as a springboard, and that’s how it affected me. It prompted me to pool my energy with other women in feminist activism around the miner’s strike (“tampons for miner’s wives”) and in the women’s theatre company Medusa (one look from men and we turned them to stone). Above all, Daly gave me a glimpse of what’s possible when women don't seek male approval or validation: when sisters do it for themselves.
Looking at the senior artists within our city (when I was still in Vancouver) who are internationally renowned and with whom we felt absolutely no affinities, Hannah Jickling, Helen Reed and I asked ourselves one night over drinks: Whose lineages do we follow? And whose legacies do we want to carry on? I guess it depends on how you define predecessors. For me, this conversation stemmed from the topic of who our weird and queer elders could be. For those who are searching, many of the artists and writers one generation before us – the voices we respect and cherish because they resonate – died in poverty and obscurity, from hiv/aids-related complications. I really don’t want this to sound romantic, because it’s not. It’s depressing and enraging. As an interlude, I feel like I have been searching for my predecessors, or a mentor, for a very long time. I never knew what I was doing until I was doing it. Working in a smaller community like Edmonton (where I grew up), I was asked to start mentoring others almost as soon as I started doing anything. Maybe the scene was too small or too new, but I never felt like there was a clear path to take. Sitting around one night, we asked each other to identify our chosen predecessors by picking three individuals, living or dead, to be our ideal trifecta. Hannah has the full list on her phone somewhere, but I remember naming Helen Molesworth, Miwon Kwon, and Eileen Myles as mine. Looking back, I am partly embarrassed to admit to this list in print as it sounds completely arrogant, but I can attest that in the moment it was a genuine reflection of who I wanted to be: a brilliant and ethical curator; an academic whose research interests cross socio-political and spatial understandings of how we move through this world; and a bad-ass poet who is still taking and making up space for herself across disciplines. Collectively, they have inspired me to continue. I retroactively realize that none of my ideal predecessors are from any city I have ever called home. I also keep moving, and I see that as a sign that I am still searching. I recall a conversation I had many years ago with Linda
by Amy Fung
Linda Rubin
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It began with a citation, a simple handwritten note about “the power of display,” and it was through this search that I uncovered a history and practices that have informed not only my thinking but also my practice of exhibition-making. Mary Anne Staniszewski’s book The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art (1998) fell into my hands in the summer of 2004 and challenged longheld beliefs. Driven by her own doctoral research, Staniszewski explored and renegotiated the hegemony of the white cube and its solemn segregation from the world outside. In this ground-breaking study, Staniszewski unearthed the practices of visionary museum directors such as Alexander Dorner at the Landesmuseum in Hanover, Germany. In 1922, Dorner reorganized the museum’s collection into “atmosphere rooms,” with each room evoking the spirit of its era, and invited artists such as El Lissitzky to make his Abstract Cabinet (1927–28). Dorner’s definition of the museum as “kraftwerk” identified the museum as being in permanent transformation within dynamic parameters; the crossover between art and life was a relative, not an absolute, truth. Staniszewski also studied the avant-garde’s experimental exhibition design in the ’20s and ’30s, its appropriation by MoMA and MoMA’s own “laboratory” period in the ’40s and ’50s, which proposed a renegotiation of the relationship between artwork, artist, viewer, exhibition, context and curator so that all parameters became fluid. Lucy Lippard has lamented the exclusion of artists and their political actions within art history, asking “Why didn’t I learn in college art history courses about the radical politics of Pissarro or Picasso? Or the socio-political contexts in which Russian constructivism, dada, and surrealism took place? Why indeed.” 1 Staniszewski articulates in the opening lines of her study, “what is omitted from the past reveals as much about culture as what is recorded as history and circulates as memory.” 2 The acknowledgement of this absence, the omnipresence of the white cube, the segregation of the artwork from its context (physical,
by Georgina Jackson
Mary Anne Staniszewski and Mick Wilson
image courtesy of kegan mcfadden
Cover of aceartinc. artist-run-centre annual, n.d.
In my early twenties, I met two artists who, at that time, were in their early fifties. These two fags were the cofounders of an artist-run centre in the early ’80s, teachers throughout the ’90s and ran various not-for-profit art spaces in the ’00s. They had no regard for recognition or any other bourgeois concern – they always made art, they were poor all of their lives, they were beyond me and they were everything I wanted to embody. During that crucial getting-to-know-you stage, we’d drink Scotch and get stoned, watch MuchMusic, play the radio and pet their ancient Chihuahua in the second-floor apartment they rented in The Village, all the while chatting about the art community in Winnipeg. I wanted to know everything. One truth resonated early on from their stories: The art world is a series of humiliations, one after another. At the time, I wasn’t sure what they meant, and I believed it to be an exaggeration. I know now, 10 years later, that they weren't lying. These two inf luenced more than a generation of Winnipeg artists. They helped lay the foundation for artistrun culture in our city. They didn’t play the political games so many fame-seekers do, and most certainly never for
by Kegan McFadden
Queer Elders
Amy Fung is Artist Director at the Images Festival in Toronto.
Rubin before I left Edmonton. Linda grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and has had a long and established career as a dance maker and teacher across North America following her move to New York to study with Martha Graham. In her own humble manner, Linda introduced modern improvisation dance techniques to most of Western Canada. She told me the best thing I could do was to find out who I wanted to work with, and go work with them. As a gesture of creating more lateral lineages, I can only reiterate the same advice: that you can seek out who to call your predecessors.
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1 Lucy R. Lippard, “Too Political? Forget It” in Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America. (New York and London: New York University Press) p, 41.
Endnotes
2 Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), xxi.
Georgina Jackson is Director of Mercer Union artist-run centre in Toronto.
political and social) and the potential of experimentation and of different methodologies for working with artists remains with me. Also in 2004, I first encountered Mick Wilson, who taught me at the post-graduate level and would later become my supervisor for my doctorate. His humour and passion for knowledge, and exploration of what knowledge can both constitute and achieve, pervades. It is accompanied by the image of him furiously cooking up a storm in his narrow Dublin kitchen for endlessly arriving guests (artists, writers, theorists, friends), a glass of good red wine in his hand. A series of questions continuously echo in my mind (often in his voice) but the one that always present is “what is at stake?”
I always referred to Red Burns as my New York mother – which she was. Born Goldie Gennis, in 1925, in my hometown of Ottawa, she and her family were friends with my parents. I knew her mother. Red left. I never really did. Montreal, after all, is not that far. We complained about Ottawa’s narrowness and conservatism forever – in New York. Red always said that she knew me from the day I was born – which she did. I liked that she acknowledged that connection. Somehow, it tied my past, present and desired future together with hers. Everyone should have a symbolic mother. Red’s glamour, fearlessness, see-all blue eyes, wide smile, and no-BS manner were everything my mother wasn’t. Red’s ability to make her way in the world impressed me tremendously – though it took many years for me to figure out what she actually did. Goldie/Red – I never quite got used to her New York name – was co-founder and chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Regularly, and rather gleefully, she would remind me that she never went to university. At the time, I was a university professor. I thought she was making fun of me – which she probably was. On occasion, and with great pride, she would mention how pleased she was with her program’s successes. She never bragged about her own. Towards the end of her life – she worked well into her eighties – we used to meet at her office.
by Reesa Greenberg
Red Burns
Kegan McFadden is a writer, publisher, curator and artist based in Winnipeg.
a second considered their legacy. In our time, when the over-professionalization of the artist has gone unchecked to the point of suffocation, these two preferred mastering the perfect pie or creating tiny paper menageries to intermingle with orgiastic crowds of tiny paper men, mostly for their own amusement. It was these two who showed me the possibility that an artwork could make you cry. In art school, one of them was simultaneously admonished for his complete disregard of procedural protocol in the ceramics studio and heralded for his witty installation of the ceramics he’d produced. The other would woefully attend openings of his own exhibits – as his adoring public mingled, he’d kick at imaginary stones along the gallery floor and make his exit well before the night was over. This was how he stewarded galleries, taking care of their books but never wanting to be the face of the institution, ensuring success but sidestepping the spotlight. After 20 or so years of teaching as a sessional at the local art school, sending countless artists off to their careers, he finally gave an ultimatum to the administration to make him permanent faculty (not tenured) or he’d leave. He’s been directing yet another artist-run centre ever since. In 1993, when the artist-run-centre they started moved, the staff and board welcomed two stray cats into their new space. These felines were named after my queer elders. After hours, though, the cats destroyed several artworks, so an artist took the cats in, and cared for them for over two decades. Towards their end, stories would abound about who was incontinent, who needed anti-depressants, and which would outlast the other. Eventually a picture of these cats made the back cover of that arc’s annual, in memoriam. It has been noted that the artists about whom I write possess the fleeting, bohemian ability to be able to leave their apartment in the morning without a dollar in their pockets and be taken care of wherever they end up. Yet still, one of these guys is now posing nude for Sunday sketch classes to make a few extra bucks while his counterpart pines further and further for the obscurity the rest of us continue to deny him. They joke that their retirement plan is to move under a bridge, and if that doesn’t pan out, there is always murder/suicide. Art is humiliation.
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It’s perhaps a feature of interdisciplinarity that one may attribute one’s formation to a wide range of influences. Or, conversely, that being their beneficiary means that one’s practice turns out to embrace several disciplines. Either way, having encountered gifted individuals along the way, it does seem as if the influence most needed at a given time is somehow destined to appear. As a student in the mid-60s, in a Canada curiously indifferent to the arts, Montréal’s Sherbrooke Street was a learning axis, with Albert Dumouchel at the École des beaux-arts, John Lyman and Guy Viau at McGill, and Arthur Lismer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Art-making at the time, I thought, was printmaking, drawing and painting, and I was privileged to work with exceptionally fine practitioners of each. For example, Dumouchel was in his early 50s when I returned from an obligatory starving artist sojourn in Europe and managed to join his very select advanced printmaking class. What I’d heard about Albert made me want to work with him, but I’d come up against a series of unmovable barriers in the form of École des beaux-arts secretaries and assistants, each insisting sternly that Professor Dumouchel was already overbooked and that there would be no room in that seminar for years. But he was the master printmaker with whom I wanted to study, and desperate situations call for desperate measures, as they say. So I filled a black portfolio with the two years of drawings and prints I’d brought back, attached a label with the words, “For Albert Dumouchel”, taped a begging note inside and dropped the portfolio onto the front steps of the building. Someone must have found it, and no doubt thought me crazy, but passed it along to Dumouchel who, after some quizzing and reproaching, let me into the course. His profound skill as a teacher, as well as his love of printmaking and seemingly endless know-how, plus his wonderful, heartfelt laugh, were a formative force in my life. I thought there must be no more satisfying way to make art than in the tradition that Albert made manifest.
by Vera Frenkel
Albert Dumouchel and Yvonne Rainer
I remember being terribly flattered when Red asked me to read the draft of a keynote address she was working on for some tech industry conference in Tokyo. And then, my consternation at how incredibly simple and direct the text was – long before ted talks – accompanied by the realization – once again – that academe needn’t/shouldn’t be an ivory tower but an incubator for innovation like the one she fostered for more than 40 years. Red’s Washington Square apartment was my New York “hotel” for decades. Even when I was a teenager, she would ask what shows I had seen and my opinions about them. George Sawchuk Red listened and questioned and her questions made me question. Her best questions were the silent ones – just a by Jesse Birch questioning, eyebrow-raised look. “You may not know what I’m trying to say, but you can always find Red was generous and supportive but rightly dismissive a different meaning.” 1 -George Sawchuk of some of my naïve ideas. Her commitment to improving society creatively through technology always served as a The winding Island Highway moves with the coast as it corrective to any highfalutin notions I may have occasion- nears Fanny Bay. Glimpses of the Salish Sea, the mainland ally had about the art world. From her, I learned about mountains, and the Gulf Islands appear through the trees, discipline, commitment, modesty, healthy skepticism and and then, a yellow gate. It’s easy to miss despite the cotaking pleasure in life while working hard. I can sense lour, and 22 years ago, I almost did. Mist hung in the trees Red’s disapproval at the implied sentimentality of what I and the air was sharp as I made my way past the gate and have just said – but I also think she would be pleased. down the muddy path leading to signs for Walden’s Way No matter what or when, Red made me feel very special. and Ville Duchamp. At her funeral two summers ago, I met so many others for When George Sawchuck arrived in Fanny Bay in 1976, whom she had the same effect. We all thought we were the he began transforming the forest beside his home into an only one – which is what made Red special. outdoor gallery. But Sawchuk was working with trees long before he arrived in Fanny Bay. Leaving school at age 13, Reesa Greenberg is an art historian, independent scholar and museum consultant. She teaches at Carleton University, Ottawa, and York University, Toronto. he worked in forestry for many years before an industrial accident cost him his leg. After he could no longer work, Sawchuk began making wooden sculptures around his North Vancouver home, and caught the attention of his neighbours, Iain and Ingrid Baxter of N.E. Thing Co. Before long he was participating in one of the most important art exhibitions of the 20th century: 955,000, curated by Lucy Lippard, at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970. The exhibition was named after the population of Vancouver at the time, and its influential catalogue consisted of a stack of index cards, each one a set of instructions by the artists describing how to complete their work. Sawchuk’s card described the procedure for a work called Pipes Through Trees, and shared specific
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Vera Frenkel is an internationally renowned Canadian multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been shown at festivals and galleries including the MoMA, New York, the Venice Biennale, Documenta IX, Kassel, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Fast-forward to a later stage of my life when I was in New York, newly divorced, and sleeping on a stretch of twoinch foam in a corner of Yvonne Rainer’s loft. I remember waking up to the aroma of fresh coffee, and seeing her across the large space using a sophisticated press-down plunger method I hadn’t seen before, which she said was a French press, sometimes called a bodum® or Melior. Printmaking had opened out into time-based works and I’d given a talk and screening at MoMA the night before but hadn’t thought far enough in advance about where I might sleep, and Yvonne came to my rescue. I was in such awe of her films, her insights and her eloquence that I suspect shyness made me an awkward guest. Still, we ended up talking quite easily, and I learned about her struggles to protect her studio against a greedy landlord and bullying developers. As I recall, she was instrumental in pulling her neighbours together into an effective negotiating counterforce, an example that served me well in subsequent dilemmas. We also talked about the aftermath of divorce and, in a moment of unforgettable empathy, Yvonne handed me a set of keys and said, “If things get rough and you need a place to stay while you’re healing, feel free...” I kept those keys in my purse for a decade, and still have them somewhere. Rainer’s influence stayed with me: first, her compelling and beautiful films, extending further to reveal a brilliant artist rooted effectively in community concerns and deeply compassionate, a combination of characteristics that I profoundly admire. Between those two events were key encounters with Lyman, Lismer and Viau, but those are another story. Let’s just say that Sherbrooke Street when I was young, and Yvonne Rainer’s loft when I was starting a new life, were locations where influence occurred, their inhabitants’ work, words and gestures formative. George Sawchuk, Yard Work, 1988- 2011.
1 Alice, Mary, “George Sawchuk: Home in the Woods” Grunt Archives. Flash Video http:// sculpture.gruntarchives.org/ artist-george-sawchuk-yardwork-2011.html (accessed April 10, 2015).
Endnotes 2 Ibid.
Jesse Birch is Curator at the Nanaimo Art Gallery on Vancouver Island.
instructions on how to insert the pipes properly depending on the slope of the land. In 1976, when he and his partner, Pat Helps, decided to get away from Vancouver’s 955,000+ residents, and purchased four acres in Fanny Bay, Sawchuk brought his contemporary art practice with him to the woods. When I first visited Sawchuk’s forest in 1993, I found saws and faucets embedded in tree trunks, wooden books that came out of tree libraries, and a wooden telephone in a tree phone booth through which one could ostensibly speak to nature through culture – as if there is any other option. I had very little experience with contemporary art, and even though I missed many of Sawchuk’s references, the idea that it was possible for something like this to be art stayed with me. The whole forest was activated as a third interlocutor in the conversation between artworks and visitors. In the spring of 2015, I returned to Sawchuk’s forest led by curator Grant Shilling, who knew the artist well, and who is working on a book titled The Book of George: The Life and Art of George Sawchuk. This time we didn’t enter through the yellow gate, but from the front driveway. Pat met us there and showed us through two large sheds full of Sawchuk’s portable sculptures before we walked into the forest. The saws and faucets from 21 years ago were being absorbed by their host-trees. The sculptural memorials to workers, soldiers and artists, and the critical works about industry, capitalism and religion, have begun to decay. Pointing out three wooden fish floating in a shallow pond, Grant mentioned that in the summer the pond dries up and the fish lie on the ground, but in the winter the pond fills up again and once again they float. This slow kinetic sculpture can only be witnessed through repeat visits and a keen eye. Sawchuk said that he wanted to learn what the woods had to teach.2 I didn’t meet him during his lifetime, but what I learned, on both of my visits, is to value discovery above all and to listen to what both the works, and the surroundings, have to say.
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Bill Murray and I were walking one day in Williamsburg when he stopped mid-stride to watch a minor drama play out across the street. We were passing by a daycare centre for developmentally disabled adults. At that moment an aide was attempting to convince his obstinate charge to continue on their walk. “Will you look at that,” said Bill, “Look at that body language.” The unmoving man was pitched forward at the hips in a stance of unequivocal defiance. Feet firmly planted, fists balled at his sides, jaw jutted. If he were to be sketched as a cartoon there’d be steam coming out of his ears. Bill wordlessly assumed an identical posture, and I remember thinking that he was capturing – as a dancer might a gesture – the physical essence, or spirit, of the micro-narrative we were happening past. On another afternoon, Bill and I were perusing a flea market on the East River. We stopped by a cookie stand and the young woman working there turned red. “You probably don’t remember this, but I met you once in an airport in Germany. I was crying, and you came up and handed me an ice cream. I never got to thank you. The cookies are on me!” I once asked him what it’s like to go through the world constantly making people happy. He shrugged, thoughtfully, and told me he’s always been that way, only now it sometimes seems demanded. Within a month of meeting Bill – he was a frequent diner at a restaurant where I worked – I was diagnosed with cancer. Our quippy, flirtatious server/customer banter accelerated into a meaningful friendship, in no small part due to the deep concern and affection he showed me. Life felt surreal in those early months. Becoming friends with Bill seemed appropriately tuned to the improbable nature of everything. When you dine out with Bill, he likes to order most of the menu. More than once I’ve seen him ask the chef for a recipe. The first night I waited on him, he asked me who my favourite living poets were. A year later, in one of his
Sometime around 1967, while a student at Mount Allison University, James MacSwain appeared onstage as one of the Weird Sisters, the witches who cryptically warn Macbeth of his destiny. That's Jim in a nutshell. Gender queer. Performer. Weird in the full Pagan sense of the word: speaking of fate and the uncanny, exceeding the boundaries of any simple binary. Over the years, Jim has visited many of the standing stones and other sacred Neolithic sites on both sides of the Atlantic. He and I mark the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross-quarter days together. Paganism and radicalism, both cultural and political, along with a shared sense of humour, have sustained our friendship for the past four decades. I nurture a conceit that we are ancient demons – Balderdash and Folderol – disguised as mortals, but homesick for the pyroclastic lava flows of the Underworld. Jim, whose totem is the dragon, is prone to fiery exhalations. “Now Folderol,” I scold him, “don’t shape-change in front of the Christians!” Jim was born in Amherst, NS, midway between the liberation of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima. A sensitive, well-behaved boy who lost his mother at the age of 19, he struggled with his queerness until his escape across the Tantramar Marshes. Mount A, in Sackville, New Brunswick, opened to him the world of literature, theatre and art. He said good riddance to the church, guilt and heteronormativity, and slammed the door behind him. Surprisingly, both Jim and Amherst remain standing after that encounter, although Amherst looks a bit the worse for wear. In advance of the Summer of Love and the Stonewall Rebellion, Jim found his way into the counterculture through the Beat Poets, Genet and Existentialism. Studies in Edmonton and time in Montreal and Ireland led him back to Nova Scotia in the early ’70s, part of a loose collective of artistic freaks (as we so-called hippies preferred to name ourselves), who practised theatre and puppetry, and founded, in an 1867 Italianate mansion, a communal image courtesy of the artist
by Corrine Fitzpatrick
by Robin Metcalfe
James MacSwain, Amherst, 1984, Super 8 film, 12 min.
Bill Murray
James MacSwain
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Robin Metcalfe is Director/Curator at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
household that continues to this day. Say to anyone in Halifax’s film, media, music, theatre, literary or visual arts community that there is a party at Brunswick Street, and they won’t need to be told the address. Jim has the gatekeeper room, to the left just inside the front door, a lair of books and art and costumes, a live-in cabinet of curiosities rising to a ceiling tangle of ornamental plasterwork. Jim’s presence also shapes the magnificent shade garden that slopes down from the back of the house towards the dockyards. He and his partner, artist Andreas Guibert, of Buenos Aires, Halifax, Shanghai and currently Barcelona, have been the lead gardeners for the past quarter century. Artist, poet, singer, cineaste, curator and arts administrator, Jim is Halifax’s Cocteau. Receiving Nova Scotia’s top award for cultural contributions, the 2011 Portia White Prize, for his mentorship of emerging artists in almost every medium, Jim sang the names of all the preceding laureates. Since then, filmmakers Eryn Foster and Sue Johnson have been making a documentary film about him, and a younger generation of queer activists have celebrated him as an elder. In 1979, The Body Politic published my profile of Jim as the Bearded Lady, his solo stage personification of antipatriarchal rage. Cut from the same cloth as Quentin Crisp, Jim is a maiden aunt with facial hair and a straight razor in her cardigan. I love talking. Since I was a baby, it has been my greatest pleasure. Talking is the best. It might be the only thing that I’m really good at. But realizing something like that about yourself is hard: what does that mean? Should you go into politics? Sales? What if all of that sounds terrible? What if you have philosophical and aesthetic pretensions surrounding your activities? What do you do when you realize that the one thing you might be really good at is something that nearly everyone does, almost automatically, mostly without thinking about it at all? What if your special skill is the most common skill after having mass, being three-dimensional and breathing? Can you imagine that? Saying your skill is being threedimensional? How can you feel any pride in that at all? Realizing this about myself was a crisis point. Thankfully, there was a precursor, and discovering him saved my life. Since the ’60s, David Antin has been doing “Talk Pieces” where he essentially shows up in front of a group of people and talks to them for about an hour. He has no notes; he does his thinking on the spot. He takes tangents, embracing huge divagations from where he begins and it is magical. For me, this discovery was huge. The only other comparable influence on my own talking work has been Robert Ashley, but there was something about the scale, ambition and theatrical dimensions of Ashley’s operas, as well as their incredible, heavily present librettos, that took them away from being performance art – they were something else. With Antin, there was something so powerful in the improvisational aspect of the work, and such an immediate response to the contingencies of each and every performance context, that the work could only really exist as performance. More than that, Antin’s work also tied in well with my other art-historical interests. Here was a performance artist who had taken something that was usually seen as a support for other things – the weird lube that surrounds artworks in artist talks, dinner party chit-chat, galleryopening small talk and so on – and put that weak material right in the centre of his work. And it is exactly this kind
by Steve Kado
David Antin
Corrine Fitzpatrick is a poet in Brooklyn, NY. Her art writing can be found online at artforum.com and in various artist’s books and publications.
homes, I saw a small pile of books by the poets I’d named. Once I visited him on a set where he had only been working for four days; he knew every single person’s name, and on his final day shooting he bid a personal farewell to (and did a shot with nearly) everyone. His capaciousness and curiosity, I’ve learned, are inextricable from the pathos he summons onscreen. Everything – every fleeting emotion, drive, observation, question – gets fully expressed through a largesse both social and artistic. Watching Bill act or edit or walk through my neighbourhood, I’ve come to realize that he trades in empathy and timing. His famed impetuousness and irreverence are, I think, grace notes to a studied precision. He reminds me of the late artist Bas Jan Ader falling off his roof, dangling from a flimsy tree branch, or riding his bike into an Amsterdam canal. Both Ader and Bill project unadorned melancholy through deadpan physicality. Each understands how to construct scenarios, or tempos, from which they can let go. “Take care of yourself and others,” Bill closed a recent email. Through his friendship, as well as his craft, the man does as he says.
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I dribble out a little libation of water almost every morning now. And most mornings I bow towards the rising sun, at the tall window through which I can see the floodlights of the park where my grandpa used to watch baseball with the boys in stadium bleachers long torn down. I was born into a weird and wonderful mystery that I locate beyond my skull-bound subjectivity. Something I know without being told. I kiss my fingers and touch the thrift store frame around Derek’s face. This image orients the past in direct relationship to the present, in plain old onanistic wishful twincest. I obsess over my queer forbearers, and in turn they bear me forth. Our predecessors – those who died before we will – they thought of us too. What a relief that is. Caravaggio, in Jarman’s eponymic film, is urged to “repeat an old truth in new language,” to pick up what his predecessors had left him. What a relief from the demands of innovative genius. Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson uses the term “longitudinal epiphany,” 1 meaning an epiphany played out through time, generations even, but, the thing is, she thinks we’re losing our talent for it, as a culture. I was blessed with two strong mentors in my teens. These men impressed on me a sense of our lineage from very early on. As a teenager, I would often sleep with my head turned to the side, my neck cramped by spiked hair, held by hairier, more callused hands. I heard the stories of chance encounters with powerful homos and I too had my own brushes with that serendipitous bristle. I gained a sense of the resplendence of the darkness we inhabit. But many do not. And I set out to repeat Derek’s experience with his hero that night. Of course, coming of
An orgasm joins you to the past. Its timelessness becomes the brotherhood; the brethren are lovers; they extend the family. It was then, is now and will be in the future . . . There was a night when I clicked into the ghost of one of my heroes, Caravaggio. It was an odd moment in which the past actually flashed into the present, physically – fucking with the past if you like. — D. Jarman, A Saint’s Testament
by Jamie Ross
Derek Jarman
Steve Kado is an artist, composer and writer based in Toronto and Los Angeles.
of refocusing of attention – bringing the material that is outside the work into the work – that so entranced me in the work of Michael Asher or Dan Flavin. But Antin’s work can’t luxuriate in the anonymity that an Asher intervention has. In a way that is almost excruciating, Antin has to be there: he himself has to stand for and as the work. His goofy sense of humour is inseparable from his bald head, his turtlenecks and jeans, his weird choice in hats… Instead of adopting a larger-than-life performance artist persona to mediate that tough barrier between audience and performer à la Abramovic, Beuys or Acconci, he instead is infuriatingly available; he comes off as very smart but totally normal. People heckle, they mutter questions, he responds! He deals! He is so casual that it’s easy to forget that art is even happening in the room. For the last four years, Nicolas Miller and I have been hosting a radio show for and about Talking in/as/for Art on Los Angeles’ kchung Radio. We started the show because talking was something that really mattered in our own work. The first show we aired was a recording of a Talk Piece and since that time we have tried to explore talking in every direction we could think of, defining talking and art in the broadest terms we could imagine. Yet, I feel like the entire show, the entire venture, has been an exploration under the wing of Antin’s 40+-year commitment to making this strange, omnipresent substance really matter.
Cover of David Antin's Talking at the Boundaries (New Directions, 1976).
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If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone.*
1 Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 113.
Endnote
Jamie Ross is a Montreal-based artist and witch whose practice centres on magic and queer community, with a particular interest in rural Canadian history.
* English translation by MacGill-Eain.
Without a doubt, blood ancestors are crucial. But so are the successors. I have succeeded the plague dead, the one during the 1980s that sent ashes cascading onto the White House lawn and the one in the 1830s that set the croft ablaze in Baile Dhubhthaich and sunk the fishing boat in Penetanguishene. And Derek, well, the house where he died is perched on the Kentish coast of England. It still looks straight out onto the rising sun. He had us in mind.
I will wait for the birch wood until it comes up by the cairn, until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice will be under its shade.
The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig, a birch tree, and she has always been
age happens in relation to death; it happens in tandem with the acknowledgement of one’s impermanent station in this place. For a year, I put it to those I admire, companions from around the world: offer your bodies to the spirits of the dead. Upload webcam and cellphone video. They’re still up on XTube. Yes, blood ancestors are important. They get their own little frames on top of my dresser. In the winter, I spend a lot of time relearning the languages of my recent ancestors. With my Gàidhlig teacher I pore over an epic poem from the 20th-century bard Somhairle MacGill-Eain, which begins: image courtesy of the artist
Jamie Ross, Rousings: A Luminous Brotherhood, 2013, video still from sex magick post-porno video performance collaboration.
May Ebbitt Cutler, my aunt and mentor, was as an exceptional conversationalist, a bon vivant and a lover of books. She was born in East End Montreal and grew up workingclass Irish in a French-speaking community. A formidable figure in the Canadian literary landscape, May founded Tundra Books in 1967, a publishing company dedicated to introducing gallery artists to young children through regional storytelling. As a child, I would often receive a Tundra book for Christmas, cherishing the artwork and the simple, intimate stories that unfolded between the covers. May’s aesthetic engagements, from the modern art on the walls of her home to the sumptuous table laid with pottery by Québécois artists, was a revelation to my own emergent sensibilities. It was, I believe, at one of her famous Sunday brunches that I tasted my first avocado. As a child, time with May always meant new sensory experiences. And as I grew older, this was complemented by a friendship that satiated both my intellect and my imagination. In 1946, May earned a Master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and upon graduation worked at the United Nations – amazing feats for a woman at that time, never mind someone in my familial orbit. I still imagine my aunt walking the streets of New York City attending the theatre, opera and museums, not to mention exploring hot dog concessions, delis and fine dining establishments. For me, May was a cross between Julia Child and Coco Chanel, a tall and powerful presence in elegant tweed suits. While I was pursuing a PhD in London, England in the ’90s, I came to know her on different terms. May would visit the city annually to attend the London Book Fair, catch some new play in the West End and take me out for a lavish dinner. At one tony Knightsbridge restaurant, we ate like queens while sharing three bottles of delicious wine. The conversation always flowed, whether discussing the book trade or my dissertation on Surrealism and the sciences. May was thrilled to hear about new genres in contemporary art or the latest philosophical theory I was chewing on. On one
by Randy Lee Cutler
May Cutler
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A great wonder of my young adult life was landing in a lecture hall at a large state university in the middle of Pennsylvania during 1996. In front of me on one fall night was an older philosopher with a hard-to-place accent. I would learn later that he was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and a Sephardic Jewish mother and that his background was utterly intertwined with the cataclysms of European history of the early 20th century. He spoke with a dizzying range of references, compelling enough to almost forget about the large disfiguring growth on the right side of his face. Whatever intellectual equipment I had acquired by that point was not suited to this setting. I was lost, confused, excited and completely sure that what was going on was important. I was not registered in the class at first, if what transpired could ever be called a class, but over the next few years I would study with him and those who gathered around him. In the library, I would trace references that came out of these strange lectures. I would grab books that seemed related, and then followed their indexes and footnotes to other books. I was really out to sea, but pretty earnest about the whole thing. Ivan Illich was the name of this compelling scholar-in-residence whose books became guides in charting this weird field that I apprehended but had no idea how to navigate. Even the books I didn't read, I carried around with me. This stack of readings became an emblem of the importance of this experience as an initiation into scholarly pursuits. He referred to the tumour on the side of his face as "my mortality." Someone mentioned to me that a surgery would have threatened his ability to speak and he dismissed any thought of that kind of intervention in his illness. He had written a book called Medical Nemesis (1975) in which he stated that we had entered a scenario where the medical industry was bad for our health and disconnected us from possible arts of living and dying. I understood that he smoked opium for the pain. These facts were incredibly moving to me, this extremely visceral relation between
by David Senior
Ivan Illich
David Senior, notes from Ivan Illich lectures, Penn State University, 1996.
In very many ways, both concrete and ephemeral, AA Bronson is the weird elder of us all. That is, if you are in the arts in Canada at all, if you are a Torontonian, if you are queer, if you hold any stake in conceptual art, in media criticism, in the aids crisis, in healing, in spirituality. The more I investigate it, the more the queer hive mind of General Idea seems to me like the Moirai, the Greek Fates. Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis as three gay men, as three neon poodles who predicted with uncanny accuracy so much of what constitutes contemporary media and visual culture (consider for a moment that General Idea not only understood, but elucidated the concept of “going viral” 20 years before Buzzfeed was ever even a thought).
by Sholem Krishtalka
AA Bronson
Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator.
such occasion, over dessert and coffee, I remember her joyful tears expressing astonishment at all the new ideas I was learning and now sharing with her – after all, she had informed the very contours of my own aesthetic awareness. Up until she died, May modelled the qualities of a curious person and an engaged citizen. Among her many accomplishments, from newspaper journalism, authoring several books and plays, and founding Tundra Books, to her excellent culinary skills and visits to every continent on the planet, my aunt was also the first woman to serve as the mayor of the City of Westmount in Montreal. The impact of May’s courageous life on my own nascent ambitions and sensibilities has been both foundational and long lasting.
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David Senior is Bibliographer at The Museum of Modern Art Library. He publishes an artist's book series through Printed Matter that has included publications by Dexter Sinister, David Horvitz, Emily Roysdon, Aaron Flint Jamison, Triin Tamm and Eve Fowler.
a thought or idea and an absolutely corporal moving around within that idea. In the lecture hall, he would chart out broad themes that seemed disconnected and then elegantly weave them together. He would sit cross-legged on a chair, gesturing and referring energetically to a stack of index cards that he kept with him as his notes. The register of his prose was rousing, containing precise arguments about issues of inequality and his philosophy regarding technology and contemporary life. One of the catches with my devotion was my lack of any confidence to speak freely to him. A couple of times in his company he asked me how much time I had. I waffled and stuttered in response. He was a teacher looking for students and asking if I had time to work on his projects. I didn’t get that until afterwards. For the couple of years that I was around during his talks and meetings, there was a real sense that he was working on his last projects, of an end that was coming soon. It was a tragic scenario that he acted out publicly with extreme integrity and humour. He had friends around him and his philosophical meanderings always referred back to the conceptual and practical importance of a circle of friends, conspirators sharing a meal, living artfully – ideas that were at once simple and definitive.
Sholem Krishtalka is a Canadian artist and writer based in Berlin.
And now, AA, the sole survivor, has become a weird elder even more concretely. I wandered through The Temptation of AA Bronson at Witte de With in Rotterdam in late September 2013, shortly after meeting AA for the first time. Here was a weird constellation that mapped the reverberations of collaboration. Younger artists from across the globe, all seeking an elder; reflecting him, echoing him, engaging with him, plugging into him; and he into them – the elder seeking a younger. How strange and how marvelous to see, in a context so rife with individualism and competitiveness, these strands of energetic and artistic exchange, this web of generational continuity. I myself have always longed for a weird elder, and have always sought them out. I am of an orphaned generation of gay men. The generation that would have taught me how to be a gay man almost all died, and the ones who remained were devastated by grief. Felix, June 5, 1994 is one of the few artworks in front of which I have cried. I cry for the terrible loss that settles in poor Felix’s blank eyes: one man’s loss of a lover, an entire generation’s loss of a forebear, of a parent, of an elder. I met AA properly in the summer of 2013. I had been in Berlin for a couple of months when he got in touch and suggested an outing to Teufelssee (literally translated, “the Devil’s lake”), one of the many small clothing-optional lakes that surround Berlin. Myself, AA and Mark, AA’s partner, spent the day naked, chatting and swimming and eating. We saw each other regularly for lunch or coffee, exchanging gossip and tales of the trials and tribulations of acclimating to Berlin life. We got to know each other. And then he asked me to work for him. Three times a week, I cycle across town and sit across from him at a long table. Mark sits to my right. We type, we file, we email, we archive, we produce, we drink tea, we chat, we gossip. I immerse myself in a body of work that has shaped so much of my context, and so much of me. I sit; I absorb; I learn – more than I have ever learned since my first years of art school; I contribute; I engage; I continue to build this most valuable bridge, this one that I have been building my entire adult life.
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Cornelia Wyngaarden: Heroines
by Liz Park
Eight years after our first encounter, I am preparing Cornelia Wyngaarden is a familiar name in Vancouver’s about art community, appearing frequently in the paper for a multi-part curatorial project, Cornelia Wyngaarden: files and production credits in video works housed in var- Heroines. It began as an open invitation to curate an exious artist-run centres in the city. She has served these or- hibition at csa Space, located within mere blocks of both ganizations as a bookkeeper, an editor, a grant writer, an the Western Front and vivo’s prior residence. Scheduled administrator, a photographer, a collaborator, a fundraiser, to open in fall 2015, this exhibition is buttressed by contriand above all, as an artist. I am a thirty-something curator, butions from other organizations in Vancouver, including a woman of colour, who got my start in the artist-run, Artspeak, grunt gallery and the Western Front, who will non-profit, experimental art spaces in Vancouver – the lend their expertise in publishing, website-building, and very spaces to which Corry has selflessly given countless media arts production, respectively. Amid overwhelming hours. She used that name – Corry – to introduce herself support for this project and Corry herself, I want to critto me when we first met. Corry, Cornelia. I was 24 years old, ically reflect on what is at stake in this project. A project fresh out of graduate school. I asked, Cornelia Wyngaarden? framed as one of legacy, it raises questions such as: how do we rebuild history? For whom, and for what? She smiled and affirmed. The most immediate answer to “for whom” is for Corry. I knew Cornelia Wyngaarden the video artist before I got to know Corry. My master’s thesis exhibition took me I am choosing to write with the first person pronoun, and to the archives at the Western Front Society and the vivo in the most personal of ways, because I owe this privilege Media Arts Centre, where I screened numerous titles of to the radical feminists – like Corry herself – who came video art made in Vancouver in the 1980s and the 1990s. before me, and had declared that “the personal is politiThe exhibition was titled Limits of Tolerance: Re-framing cal.” They primed the art world for discussions of gender Multicultural State Policy. Faithful to its subtitle, I looked inequity. As Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay “The Personal Is at Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden’s 32-minute Political” proposes, the false dichotomy of what is considvideo Hogan’s Alley (1994), an investigation of a black neigh- ered an individual struggle in the private domestic sphere bourhood in Vancouver that was razed as the result of the versus the political in the context of the Women’s Liberation construction of an expressway overpass. I learned about Movement undermines the validity of what we as india part of Vancouver history that is never commemorated, viduals feel and experience in inherently asymmetrical and was left with an impression of two radical video art- power relations.1 To expand our understanding of politics ists cum historical revisionists. I wanted to see more of beyond the electoral, and to re-imagine the individual Wyngaarden’s work, but found that it was not so easy to struggle to that of the collective – these are the true aims find or accessible, because few of her works are digitized, I see behind that clarion call. In revisiting the intimate tales of the heroines in Corry’s video works, this project even to this day. shares these aims, and makes it, for me, both personal and political. Weaving in and out of her now decades-old video installation works, this text is a reflection of my personal engagement with the artist and her work.
Cornelia Wyngaarden, Apollo's Kiss, 1992, five panel lightbox installation. images courtesy of the artist
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Corry’s works are often driven by characters who straddle the real and the mythical, sharing with the audience the most intimate details of their personal lives while addressing larger systemic problems of worldly proportions. This is certainly the case with Keely Moll, the heroine of her first significant installation As a Wife Has a Cow. Presented in 1985 at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the work consists of six monitors placed atop bales of straw arranged in a circle. On the monitors, Moll is seen in a pastoral setting, and with ease, responding to questions about her daily life and struggles on the ranch. Interspliced in the interviews are rodeo scenes of a man riding a cow. As Scott Watson writes of this juxtaposition in the 1994 catalogue Cornelia Wyngaarden: The Fragility of Origins, “It’s hard to escape the point: Moll, the woman, works her ranch in easy symbiosis without force. The rodeo men exercise their cruelty in a frenetic desire to subdue nature.” 2 Its most direct counter-point being Richard Prince’s Cowboy series (1980–1992) comprised of appropriated Marlboro cigarette advertisements, As a Wife Has a Cow presents a compelling case against the reification of idealized concepts of the American West and masculinity: firstly, through the introduction of a confident woman for whom gender is a construct that she actively redefines; and secondly, through the format of the video installation that offers a durational experience of this character rather than locking her representation in a singular moment. This work marks the beginning of Corry’s investigation into how to open up a closed circuit of signifiers and explore a less binary, more rhizomatic way to allow for multiple meanings to enter and exit. When speaking about her work, Corry often stresses to me the importance of poetics and indeterminacy even though she herself takes on firm political positions for advocacy in daily life. For Corry, a simple inversion does not suffice, for the aesthetic language she has sought in her subsequent works is one layered with rich ambiguity and intentional gaps. Brice Canyon, the curator of the above mentioned 1994 exhibition conjectures that “[i]f meaning is negotiable, then it is the subjectivity of the viewer, of history and its construction that Wyngaarden points to as the real polemic.” 3 In her next major installation work, Apollo’s Kiss/Matricide: An Allegorical Landscape, she creates an environment where that polemic plays out and where our own subjectivity as viewers/participants is placed in the foreground.
A complex installation with multiple components, Apollo’s Kiss is not easy to describe nor did I fully understand its expansive meanings and intricate web of references until after months of revisiting the work again and again. By no means a comprehensive description, I offer a concise list of what comprises this 1991 presentation: five monitors capture an idyllic landscape, interrupted by a lightning bolt and the throw of a sickle by a woman warrior; on an additional pair of monitors, a different landscape is depicted. In one of them, a woman with full gold locks guards a cave on all fours and barks like a dog; Apollo’s Kiss prominently incorporates text, excerpts from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, painted on the wall. This trilogy of Greek tragedies, replete with stories of war, murder, vengeance and vindication, serves as the historical reference point for very contemporary concerns that Corry brings forth in that project; finally, presented as a companion to the installation, Susan Lord’s essay “Outliving Apollo’s Kiss” prompts the reader to consider the millennia-old stories of war and the place of women within them. Lord shares her reflections on the moment: “As I read Aeschylus’s Oresteia, set roughly 3000 years ago when Agamemnon returned from the ten year war which destroyed Troy, and first performed in Athens in 458 BC, within living memory of the Persian Wars… Iraqis are being ‘precision bombed.’…We protest, but ‘this is not another Vietnam.’” 4 She thus interpellates readers who are thrust into spirals of history, where moments of crisis and unrest confront them. As an artist committed to speaking to the present and about what feels politically urgent, Corry looks to such times to do more than illustrate. She adds layers of complications and nuances. Her work is not a damnation of war and its place in history, but a teasing out of issues that are otherwise overlooked in hyper-masculinized and militarized world.
Still from Cornelia Wyngaarden, Apollo's Kiss, 1992, five panel lightbox installation. image courtesy of the artist
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Similarly, in a heated discussion among art historians and artists printed on the pages of a 2008 issue of Grey Room, Aruna D’Souza remarks: “In most of the world, including the United States, poverty, immigration and refugee status, and armed conflicts are pressing feminist issues – if for no other reason than that their effects are felt most gravely by women… If feminism defines its politics at these sites, does it risk losing its specific identity? And what would an exhibition organized around these terms look like?” 5 Corry’s allegorical landscape in which Apollo’s kiss forever curses Cassandra, a Trojan princess and King Agamemnon’s prize concubine, offers an open-ended platform on which we are encouraged to situate feminism and our politics as a set of relations, and not as definitive markers of identity. In my email communication with Corry, she confirmed her suspicion of Apollo, the god of reason, and spoke to the oppression of women in the reign of rationality. The barking woman in her video, to whom entry into the symbolic order is denied, suggests the fate of Cassandra. Apollo lured Cassandra with the gift of prophecy, but her rejection angered him, and in rage, he spat in her mouth, cursing her words to be believed by none. Murdered by Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, for having been brought as a concubine, and cursed by Apollo for denying him sex, Cassandra remains a tragic heroine in front of an abyss, what comes out of her mouth being the incomprehensible bark of a mad dog. Juxtaposed with the sound and the image of what could be superficially described as a mad woman are the words of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and the murderer of his mother Clytemnestra. ORESTES: Look, women, see them, there! Like Gorgons, with grey cloaks, And snakes coiled swarming round their bodies! Let me go! … O Lord Apollo! More and more of them! Look there! And see - their dreadful eyes dripping with bloody pus! Referring to the Furies, female deities of vengeance who are seeking Orestes’ punishment, his words, as carefully selected by Corry to be painted on a wall, reveals the mental unravelling of the killer. In the latter part of her essay, Lord explains how Apollo defends the matricide in Oresteia: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, only the nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she preserves a stranger’s seed… There can be a father without a mother.” 6 If we follow Apollo’s reasoning, it matters not that Orestes killed Clytemnestra, his mother. Rather, it matters that Orestes killed Clytemnestra, the murderer of his father, King Agamemnon. Clytemnestra’s revenge killing of Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter is hysteria. Orestes’ matricide was a reasoned act of vengeance, on the other hand, defended in Athena’s court by the god of reason himself. The case is presented differently by Corry in Apollo’s Kiss: An Allegorical Landscape. A barking woman. Hysteric matricide. A weapon in mid-air. There is no sense of objectivity or justice here; the stories of tragic heroines are emotionally turbulent, rich with ambiguity. It is not the artist’s role in this work to make the judgement call on anyone’s behalf, although what is called the justice system itself falls under scrutiny if we are to think seriously about Apollo’s reasoning. “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, only the nurse of the new-planted seed that grows.” It was only a couple of weeks ago when Corry and I spoke on the phone; we brought up the recent case of Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old woman in Indiana who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for
Heroines
feticide. Framed as the killing of one’s fetus rather than as an unfortunate case of a woman who did not have access to non-judgmental, clinically safe abortion, this media event demonstrates the extent of the regressive politics of a supposedly developed nation-state. For the self-declared feminist and artist Cornelia Wyngaarden, her politics cannot be parcelled from the deeply troubled state of inequity in arenas outside of the immediate concerns surrounding the woman’s body and reproductive rights. This is certainly the case for Patel, whose sentencing and its media coverage sparked debates over gender violence, especially in immigrant communities. D’Souza’s question – If feminism defines its politics at sites outside of women’s reproductive and sexual rights, does it risk losing its specific identity? – finds an echo in this situation. The parcelization of plural identities in a postmodern subject, as Frederic Jameson would put it, is to the detriment of leftist politics. What Corry’s work does is foreground the pluralism of the subject positions, and question how we might be able to speak to the one and the many, across millennial time and vast geography. In a 1995 interview conducted by critic Robert Storr with Félix González-Torres, the late artist declared: “When people ask me, ‘Who is your public?’ I say, honestly, without skipping a beat, ‘Ross.’ The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work.” 7 Ross, his lover who succumbed to aids, the disease that would later take the artist’s own life, was for whom and for what GonzálezTorres made work. Yet, the artist’s reach was undoubtedly much more wide, as he understood that what he did for Ross operates in both the realms of aesthetics and politics. “Aesthetics are politics,” he said in the same interview. “They’re not even about politics, they are politics.” This brings me back to the inquiry with which I began this text. For whom, and for what do we practice? How do we expand our understanding of politics beyond the electoral, and how do we re-imagine the individual struggle to that of the collective? While González-Torres found a way to address the larger public through a dedication to his lover, Corry explores an aesthetics of incongruous elements whose organizing principle is the viewer’s task to figure out. In many conversations I have had with Corry, she has emphasized her dislike of speaking too directly. This is evident in Apollo’s Kiss: as well as in her subsequent installation-based projects, Forged Subjectivity (1993) and The Fragility of Origins (1994). Interestingly, the reviews of her projects from the time consistently point out the incongruity of the components that make up the larger installation as one of the defining features of her work. William Wood says of Apollo’s Kiss, “Her intricate and incoherent ensemble remains an implicating, tentative sort of puzzle-work, grafting many more issues than I have indicated onto loose and barely cogent materials.” 8 In a review of The Fragility of Origins, Steve Bridger begins with a similar sentiment: “This video installation is a collection of illogically linked elements that by some alchemy come together as a whole.” 9 Bridger extends his alchemical metaphor as he continues: “It is an alchemy of different corners and installations of bizarre poetry, not really unified, yet not apart. Like an alloy.” The different components that make up The Fragility of Origins include: photographs of the artist as a child; paintings on the walls, bees on one side, flowers on the other; a text on the wall that reads, “Contingency:/ She wore a diadem of lapis lazuli/ beads mounted with tiny leaves,/ fruits, flowers and figures of gold./ People have spoken of her odd timing;” five monitors, each showing a part of a female body, including the head, the torso, the hips, the legs, and the feet; a projection of a woman’s torso in nude overlaid with the flyleaf of Sigmund Freud’s The Future of
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an Illusion. How are we to make sense of these components under the title The Fragility of Origins? Where do we begin?
My curatorial presentation Cornelia Wyngaarden: Heroines begins where The Fragility of Origins ends. A loose grouping of components from Apollo’s Kiss and The Fragility of Origins, with a screening event of As a Wife Has a Cow, the project is still very much in progress, and subject to change. Most of my knowledge of Corry’s works comes from the meetings I have had with her and the slim book produced on the occasion of her 1994 exhibition. There is a sense of vulnerability, fragility, and uncertainty that marks all of her works, and our communication. There are twists and turns in the development of our working relationship – not unlike the main element of The Fragility of Origin: a female body literally comprised of multiple subjectivities, each segment of the body captured on the screen torquing this way and that. Corry reveals information in bits to me, and it takes me time to understand. She only ever showed me components – this video, that text, those photographs, these paintings. I was left wondering how they all cohered. Because I am approaching her work secondhand, in fragmented bits and through documentations, reviews, and texts, I am actively stitching together these parts and seeking meaning within the gaps. I finally came to a realization that Corry could only present the fragments to me, because that is the truest way in which she can relay the experience of her work. It is an integral part of her practice to leave unfettered
meanings even in the most politically urgent situations. She presents us with stories of heroines who refuse to be reduced to a singular concern: Keely Moll, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, the unnamed women in The Fragility of Origins. Corry’s works do not offer a coherent conclusion, but rather leave us hanging in various contingencies. It is much more difficult to build history from open ends; fragile origins lead to uncertain futures. But this is precisely where we ought to end up if we are to remain open to other trajectories in history, ones that allow us to think in simultaneities and continuities. While Corry’s work concerns the various roles a woman can occupy conceptually, figuratively and literally, vis à vis a feminist politics, the questions that surface in this project have a wider application. Beyond Corry, a dear friend and an important elder in Vancouver’s art community, this project is for those who share a concern for how our past is not merely to be unearthed, instrumentalized, commoditized, but how it brushes up against this very moment. Liz Park is a curator and writer from Vancouver. She has curated exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Kitchen in New York, and Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon in Seoul, and her writing has been published by Afterall Online, ArtAsiaPacific, Performa Magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among other places. In 2011–2012, Park was Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Curatorial Program at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and in 2013-2015 she was Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Endnotes 1 Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” originally published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970. Available online <http://www. carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/ PIP.html> Accessed 18 April 2015. 2 Scott Watson, “Cornelia Wyngaarden’s Queer Subjectivities,” in Cornelia Wyngaarden: The Fragility of Origins (Vancouver: Western Front, 1994), 35-44. 3 Brice Canyon, “A Post Modern Discourse: An Introduction,” in Cornelia Wyngaarden: The Fragility of Origins (Vancouver: Western Front, 1994), 5-6. 4 Susan Lord, “Outliving Apollo’s Kiss,” in Cornelia Wyngaarden: The Fragility of Origins (Vancouver: Western Front, 1994), 8-15.
5 Rosalyn Deutsche et al, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” in Grey Room 31, 2008. 32–67. 6
Lord, 12.
7 Robert Storr, “Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” in ArtPress (January 1995) 24–32. Available online <http://www. queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/ FelixGT/FelixInterv.html> Accessed 18 April 2015. 8 William Wood, “Cornelia Wyngaarden,” Parachute: Revue d’art contemporaine 63, 1991. 45–46. 9 Steve Bridger, “A Look at the Lesbian Body,” in Xtra West (January 1995).
Cornelia Wyngaarden, still from The Fragility of Origins, 1994, video installation. image courtesy of the artist
Cornelia Wyngaarden, still from Apollo's Kiss, 1992, five panel lightbox installation. image courtesy of the artist
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Feminist Approaches to Citation
by Maiko Tanaka
A friend and I are in the middle of a year-long mail correspondence project. This monthly letterwriting practice was suggested by her as a way to give concrete form to conversations we’ve been having about what kind of project we’d like to collaborate on. Through this process I’ve noticed that we carry into our letters something we do through email and in person: citing texts and projects that inspire or support us in one way or another. The texts we cite are responsive to previous letters we’ve written and they focus on sharing resources and supportive words for dealing with our different fears and struggles with writing. There is one particular poem that my friend quoted in her letter from last December that struck me when I first read it. I think it demonstrates what is vital and politically potent about this practice of citation. The piece is from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, in which she describes subtle and aggressive encounters with racism from her own lived experiences as a black woman navigating public, personal and professional spaces. Here is the passage my friend had transcribed: When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term – John Henryism – for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.1 In her letter, my friend cites this poem as giving shape to a specific process of language assimilation she put herself through as an immigrant in Canada. But it also exposes the effects of erasure and stress that these experiences have on the body over time, impacting its capacity to perform and carry on. For my friend, Rankine offers words that confront and address her in a way that simultaneously invokes ache, joy and power. In an academic context, the purpose of citation is to acknowledge sources and ideas often attributed to authority figures and seminal texts. In the context of our letters, citation expands this practice in multiple directions outside of the academy. In our letters, we acknowledge the source of our prose and situate its significance. But in my letters, I also acknowledge the reader – my friend – which in turn opens up the potential to situate the reader’s own experiences as also being significant. But this is not just about seeing one’s personal experiences “represented.” In her letter, my friend also expressed the desire to share Rankine’s work with friends and colleagues, pointing to the potential for building up a collective dialogue around how racism feels through the body for those who experience it, experience it differently or don’t experience it at all. This act of turning a personal source of empowerment into collective agency is something I have learned is a legacy of feminist pedagogies for collective empowerment and transformational change. In her 1991 text “Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production,” feminist theorist Katie King addresses the race and genderblind spots of the academic field of bibliography studies from a feminist perspective.2 She describes a US-wide workshop from the late 1970s developed by Lenore Hoffman, which had students initiate collective research into women’s literature from regional contexts. One of these workshops had students going door to door in their local neighbourhoods, asking residents which women in the area were writing poetry. King sees this as using feminist pedagogy to de-centre the academy as the legitimizing apparatus of bibliographical knowledge by empowering students to experiment with research. Following King, a critical feminist bibliographic practice asks what and for whom are we invested in when we cite, what do we consider having value, and what kinds of new research can be produced? King implicates the researcher as a political agent, writing that “Stories about the production of stories require feminists to engage in this story-making, not merely to analyze it – there are no innocent positions from which one can only look on.” 2 She thus stages an epistemological shift by asserting that the practice of bibliographic assembly cannot happen from an analytical distance and that researchers must acknowledge themselves as actively involved in the production of texts, histories, disciplines and communities. In its Spring 2013 issue, this magazine published an artist project called FAGing it Forward, produced by the Feminist Art Gallery (fag).3 This project enacted a participatory platform for citation aimed at making visible the lineages and legacies of inspiration and support that make up a feminist art community. A four-page spread displayed photographs of over 250 nametags stuck to the walls of the gallery, living room and kitchen, each tag presenting two names: the person attending an event at the fag and the name of a feminist the attendee wished to acknowledge. Artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell (founders of the Feminist Art Gallery) describe how this works:
Notes 1 Excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). Transcribed from my friend’s letter.
When you come to the fag, we ask you to make a nametag: first, with your name – so we can all know who each other is – and second, with the name of a feminist/queer/politicized artist, poet, rock star, writer, friend, inspiration, mentor, matron or lover – someone you want to make visible, someone you want everyone to know about... It’s how we tell each other about the people who matter to us. It’s how we build a community not restricted by money, geography or proximity.” 3
2 Katie King, “Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production,” TEXT 5: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (1991): pp. 91–103.
Citation here is not only an acknowledgment of sources of inspiration, but also realizes the community it references, performatively bringing it into being. FAGing it Forward accounts for the various ways a community of women artists regenerates itself and thrives. In their 2006 book A Postcapitalist
3 Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, “FAGing it Forward”, C Magazine 117 (2013): p. 10.
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Image from FAGing it Forward, an artist project by FAG (Feminist Art Gallery), a collaborative project by Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, published in C Magazine issue 117 (Spring 2013). photo: lisa kannakko; image courtesy of the artists
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Politics, J.K. Gibson-Graham4 analyze case studies from the Philippines, the United States and Australia that they identify as exemplary of the building of “community economies.” In doing so, they propose a re-thinking of economy, from something that is highly structured and deterministic to a “contingent space of recognition and negotiation” that can only happen through accounting for the social interdependencies that support their subsistence and prosperity.5 Contrasted with a star-powered art world that thrives on exclusivity and celebrates individualized virtuosity, these ideas resemble FAGing it Forward in the way they consider an ethical practice of exchange through citing unrecognized forms of sharing, labour and support. The walls of the gallery/kitchen/living room – and the ongoing conversations that take place through the events in the space (from the “party, potluck, angry letter writing frenzy, free-schooling, cat petting, the backyard screening, directed reading, protest sign making, incantation, or herbal tea and gluten-free muffin top artist talks”6) – are entangled and driven by a politics and ethics of feminist forms of relation and support. This kind of practice is not just a utopian exercise. The urgency is in articulating and enacting the recognition of different values outside of deterministic relations and divisions of labour reproduced from this art world – an art world that parallels capitalist logic. FAGing it Forward emphasizes citation as a living methodology. In 2006, in New York, during an intensive on art and social engagement at The Kitchen in which I participated in, Lauren MacDonald, an Atlanta-based artist, and fellow intensive participant, created a powerful moment of citation that I will never forget. Her action was prompted by an equally powerful proposition from Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who was the guest lecturer that day. The big news at that time was the Israeli bombings in Lebanon. Jacir had printed out dozens of emails that had arrived in her inbox that week from friends and acquaintances describing what was happening on the ground during the bombings. She passed out a different printed email to each of us in the program and asked us to work with it as material for a socially engaged artistic response in the commercial art gallery district of Chelsea where The Kitchen is located.7 For her response, MacDonald excerpted a line from the email she had been issued: “Last night was probably the most frightful night I have ever experienced in my whole entire life,” and handwrote it in sidewalk chalk across the exteriors of buildings in the centre of Chelsea. At the bottom of the quote, she provided a link to the author’s blog for any passersby and Chelsea residents whose curiosities were piqued about what the sentence is referring to.8 What struck me was how this citation put seemingly remote events into proximity, bringing the lived experience of war to places where people may not have any idea of what was happening. During the process of editing this piece, my friend Nicole Liao pointed out what makes this a novel and critical use of citation: “Conventionally, citation bridges texts and ideas, to provide proof, lineage or authority to an argument or statement…This use of citation by Jacir is great because citation here is used as a means to bridge physical and virtual space, not to mention the radically disjointed experiences in time and space (for example, we are both occupying the same present, yet your present is traumatic while mine is not)”. Jacir and MacDonald cite the firsthand experiences of war as proof or authority of the US-backed bombings that were otherwise supressed by American mainstream media and expand the possibility of using citation to legitimize embodied, personal and political experiences. This furthers the idea of citations as sources and sites for further engaged responses, actions and other forms of dissemination in urgency. The simple but contentious act of Jacir spreading these emails treads the lines between text, oral history and lived experience, which opens up new possibilities for how felt experiences might creep into political consciousness in clandestine ways. The event still stays with me today, almost a decade later. I’ve since gone back to Rankine’s quotation many times, and each time I read it I see new nuances in its details and the context it’s quoted within. Sometimes I even realize I’ve completely misread a word due to my friend’s nearly illegible handwriting. This particular act of citation functions not merely as providing the source of an idea or paying due to its author, but is specific to the situation it brings into being, from the time and place of its writing by the original author to the time and place of its quotation in the letter by my friend. It’s also specific to what I was doing and thinking as the reader, as well as the thing that prompts me to search for the letter so I can read it again. And it’s specific to the time in our lives when the words of wisdom from the shared text are nourishing and vital for both of us. The words from the quote and the ways it is set up by my friend cannot be separated. Together they make up an entangled source of wisdom and support, performed as a resource for the future. It is also specific to the durational form of exchange9 we have set up for ourselves, creating the possibility of enriching our understanding over the long run. It is something felt, lived and particular.
Maiko Tanaka is an independent curator based in Toronto. She has held curatorial positions at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and InterAccess in Toronto as well as at Casco in Utrecht, Netherlands. She recently co-edited Casco’s The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook as well as Model Minority published by Gendai Gallery. Currently, Maiko is undertaking a research residency on science fiction feminisms at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. She also serves on the board and programming committee of Gendai as well as on the editorial advisory board of C Magazine.
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4 J.K. Gibson Graham is the pen name for feminist post-structuralist geographers Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham. 5 J.K. Gibson Graham, A Post-capitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 165–167 6 Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, “FAGing it Forward, Toronto”, C Magazine 117 (2013): p.10. 7 An account of the assignment in Jacir’s own words can be found at http://electronicintifada.net/content/ ali-la-pointe-andzenas-words-newyork-streets/6242 8 The original blog post is here: http:// www.beirutupdate.blogspot. ca/2006_07_01_archive.html 9 Special thanks to Nasrin Himada for allowing me to share this instance of our letter-writing project for this article.
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Exhibition Reviews Artist Project*
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Inventory
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Artefact
* T he artist project for this issue is REARVIEWS, a publication project co-organized by Xenia Benivolski and Danielle St-Amour. REARVIEWS reviews exhibition reviews, inviting repeated and critical address of the review format from a variety of contributors. Xenia Benivolski is a curator, artist and writer currently based in Toronto.
Tiziana La Melia lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Danielle St-Amour is a writer, curator and artist currently based in Toronto.
Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist of Haida and QuĂŠbĂŠcois descent based in Vancouver.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and filmmaker from London, UK, currently living and working in Toronto, Ontario.
Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto.
Amy Lam is 1/2 of the art group Life of a Craphead, whose first film, Bugs, will premiere in 2015.
Mohammad Salemy is a New York based critic and curator. He works as an Organizer at the New Centre for Research & Practice.
Exhibitions
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Athey is placed as the central figure, rendering the other artists disciplic. It is his “evangelical ritual,
Exhibition Reviews
For Davies, the performances of Performatorium: Festival of Queer
1. D IFFICULT BODIES IN DIFFICULT TIMES PRODUCING DIFFICULT WORK Onyeka Igwe
Performance are devotional acts. From the setting of a former church in Regina, to the “Godhead” of his favoured Ron Athey, and the sacrificial Jesus figure in Martin O’Brien’s Breathe Me, this proximity to the divine, its essentially bodily nature,
is foundational to his assessment of the work. Davies is affected by “discomfort and duress.”
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Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance Regina, SK January 22–24, 2015 by Jon Davies
Taking place in the middle of a prairie winter, the 2015 Performatorium festival’s theme of “Making It, Difficult” held the promise of buckets of blood staining the Regina snow red. In fact, it was much warmer that weekend than anyone could have anticipated – a balmy 2 degrees – and while some of the performances that unfolded could be called “difficult” in terms of their intensity, duration or content, the word aptly described many pressing off-stage realities as well. The economic precarity of sustaining oneself as a performing artist, the struggle not only to communicate but also to claim and articulate one’s place in history – these things are difficult. Difficult people, difficult choices, difficult situations – but difficult to whom, and why? Curated each year by founder Gary Varro, Performatorium 2015 cultivated intimacy: all events took place in close proximity and the schedule was structured around mid-day talks followed by evenings of multiple performances at the Neutral Ground gallery and the Artesian performance space, a former church. Gathering a small group of performance artists together for three days established a provisional community, where something resembling a shared language connected artists with very different approaches, contexts, aesthetics and reference points.
Legendary Los Angeles-based artist Ron Athey magnanimously reigned over the weekend. Athey’s oeuvre is the history of aids written on the body, from a time when everyone he knew was dying, to settling into the so-called Lazarus syndrome, where those destined to die unexpectedly keep surviving and have to deal with the difficulties of simply living. I have been following Athey’s work since the late 1990s, and images of his highly theatrical performances – drawing on the forms of evangelical ritual, and on the physical violation and transformation of his and his friends’ bodies – are etched in my mind. Athey’s example is profound and far-reaching, from his influence on fellow festival performers Kris Grey and Martin O’Brien, to his close working relationship with academics like Jennifer Doyle of the University of California, Riverside, who places Athey squarely at the centre of her indispensable 2013 study Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Athey’s politics of refusal have historically cast him out of contemporary art discourse, but in his radical rigour, he is central to any feminist, queer, subcultural and embodied history of recent art. In an artist talk at the University of Regina, Athey set the stakes high: how do you push through questions of identity and representation, and actually manifest a phenomenon that “changes the room”? Athey’s presence was also key to Performatorium’s embrace of lineage and influence as means for queer and trans survival, an aspect that Kegan McFadden highlighted in his Canadian Art review of last year’s festival. Athey named Genesis breyer p-orridge and Johanna Went (among many others) as touchstones, while New York-based Anya Liftig invoked William Wegman and Gilda Radner. Once we “burn the family” as Athey nicely put it, to whom do we turn to keep us going and perhaps even understand what we are striving for? I tend to romanticize the kinship
Kris Grey, Homage, 2015, performance still, Performatorium, Regina, SK. photo © kris grey and jason cawood
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and... physical violation and transformation” of the body that situate Davies’ reception. Athey is at once a resurrected Lazarus, a demon “cast […] out of contemporary art discourse” and the omnipresent spirit underlying all the work at the festival. Within this biblical frame, Homo Monstrous is reduced to the “righteous noise” of “trans rage” while the audience anointing Athey and O’Brien’s endurance is considered “akin to [the] stations of the cross.” Davies understands performance art as bodily sacrifice, the audience gathering around an altar to witness an artist’s devotion to the form. But it is the viscera rather than the spirit that truly binds him to the work. He is riveted and revels in varying queer and trans bodies that endure and transgress social norms. It is sexy, dangerous and arduous. Difficult bodies in difficult times producing difficult work.
Exhibitions
structures that cohere even the most toxic art/subcultural scenes, so I found Athey’s “extended family” model of long-term collaboration in work and in life very moving, but artists like Liftig and Regina-based duo Homo Monstrous reminded me that relationships with one’s peers can often be more agonistic, and not in a fruitful way. If Athey was Performatorium’s godhead then Homo Monstrous (Leo Keiser and Jaye Kovach) was its heart. Behind the scenes, Keiser and Kovach ran the festival’s technical operations at the university and Neutral Ground, respectively, working closely with their fellow performers on their pieces. Their performance, How Fucking Loud Do I Have to Yell?, was harrowing, particularly as an outsider watching them here on their home turf, where the toll of day-to-day survival in a hard, isolated city was palpable. In a cover story in Regina’s alt-weekly, Prairie Dog, Kovach noted: “being on the trans female side of the spectrum… you’re in a situation where you’re almost always performing. People look at you and have questions, so it’s way more of a production than it needs to be, as far as just existing goes.” Homo Monstrous blasted the room with trans rage, with Keiser hunched on the floor among the audience – shoulder blades jutting – screaming “I’m going to lose my fucking voice” over Kovach’s righteous noise until the prophesized damage was done. Keiser and Kovach’s wall of noise drowned out their words, the droning sound physically occupying the gallery. New York-based artist Grey’s Homage saw him standing on a low, stage-like plinth with a calm smile, pierced by thick, four-inch-long needles in a horizontal line, following the scars of his breast removal surgery. His regular, sure breath acted as a kind of metronome. Then, one at a time, he removed the needles, causing blood to trace a line down his body, some pooling between his legs. After a dramatic pause, he dropped each needle. Grey’s stillness and formality suggested the creation of an iconic tableau, and in terms of imagemaking, I found myself disappointed when some of the punctures did not stream forth the highly aesthetic lines of blood on his white skin. Of course the body will do what the body wants, and therein lies the power of this kind of work, where outcomes and effects can’t be fully planned or predicted. At the artists’ roundtable
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(which I moderated), Grey spoke of orifices as sites of vulnerability: what comes in and goes out of our bodies is policed. He reverently articulated the potency and sense of agency found in giving oneself new holes. Toronto-based Jess Dobkin’s holes were more playful and vaudevillian than those punctured by many of her counterparts here. In Flowers, she anthropomorphized her vagina, dressing it up as a crude Neil Diamond to croon a duet of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” with Dobkin as Barbra Streisand. In Dirty Plotz, she gussied up her ass with a clownish face, forcing it to imbibe and then messily regurgitate the colours of the rainbow – producing an abject queer flag. Appropriately enough, this was all staged to a child’s YouTube version of the hit song “Let It Go” from Frozen, the animated Disney phenomenon deliriously adored by young girls (and some drag queens) the world over. Next to Grey’s stoic bloodshed – which can’t help but carry some bravado – I appreciated Dobkin’s comment in her artist talk (given largely to students) that her experience of giving birth consisted of as much screaming, fluids and altered states as the most “difficult” performances one could conceive. In The Human Factor, Liftig treated a fish like a lover – singing to it before the relationship soured and she destroyed it with a blender and guzzled down the chunks – and drew out the boiling alive of a lobster to its existentialist limits in Consider the Lobster. Here, Liftig’s slow, deliberate pace suggested an effort to commune with and even become the hapless crustacean before her; her movement exaggerated everyday gestures into a languorous danse macabre. Liftig’s tortured struggle – the gravitas that she brought to the decision to kill and eat her creaturely foil – effectively prolonged its life, postponing the inevitable as long as possible. In both performances, Liftig regarded the audience with a severe, defiant gaze. I found this potent sense of complicity I felt with the performers to be the most compelling part of the festival. This was often most pronounced when something did not appear to be going as it should, for example the malfunctioning blender and hot plate that Liftig required for her visceral trans-species experiments, or when a shard of spontaneously smashed electric guitar dinged Kovach in the forehead during their set. Athey’s
Predecessors
closing performance of Messianic Remains invited a heightened level of audience complicity as we were encouraged to walk up on stage to anoint Athey’s supine body – laid out on a rack of metal pipes, penetrated by a baseball bat – with a lubish gel. Communally, we rubbed his body down – an intensely intimate, tactile form of engagement. Our ministrations seemingly brought him to life as he sprang from the bed for the second part of his performance, an impish invocation of the great Divine from Jean Genet’s transgressive 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers. London-based O’Brien’s performance Breathe for Me kept me riveted throughout its three-hour duration. Leaving the Artesian, even looking away from him, seemed like a betrayal: I had to breathe for him. I haughtily fancied myself an indispensable presence, whose moral support of just being there was required for O’Brien to get through the trials before him. (Conversely, I needed to witness him make it through to the end for my own sense of closure.) O’Brien has cystic fibrosis, which is characterized by the accumulation of excess amounts of thick mucus, causing intense coughing and difficulty breathing. O’Brien risks working in the shadow of the late Bob Flanagan, who produced performance-based work from his raw sublimation of CF pain into wild bdsm experimentation with partner Sheree Rose, wresting bodily agency back from the disease. Rather than eschewing this lineage, O’Brien embraces his corporeal connection to Flanagan; he arrived in Regina from a residency at the one National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, where he had been collaborating closely with Rose while going through her archive. Breathe for Me consisted of a series of repeated, ritualistic actions akin to stations of the cross drawn from O’Brien’s experience of CF. He began by using a scalpel to carve the imagined outlines of his lungs into the skin of his chest. He then crawled down a white plastic “runway” to a kind of pillow-altar where he lay down, breathed deeply and rhythmically beat his chest (smearing the blood from the cuts in the process) to loosen the phlegm from his respiratory system, before crawling over to one of many specimen containers flanking the runway. Expelling the sputum into the first container, he crawled back to the altar and started the painful process again. After expectorating into all 30 containers, O’Brien repeated a number of other actions a grueling 30 times each.
Skinny knees on wood floor, his crawling was clearly torturous – and O’Brien soon resembled an arthritic dog, even carrying objects in his jaws. The repeated actions culminated in a debilitating march back and forth down the runway with a rubber hood over his head, which both blinded him and limited his breathing even further. O’Brien had to feel his way down the runway to get to the other side before oxygen ran out – he struggled and tripped, occasionally moaning in agony. The performance developed with a sense of inevitability; by repeating each action a set number of times, we count down along with him, while fully grasping how much was left. The end of the performance was extraordinary as O’Brien crawled down the runway once more to open the specimen containers. With each, he dug out the phlegm with his fingers and sexily anointed his body with it; he became a true diva here, playing with the goo, rubbing it in like lotion, even tossing it over his shoulder as if it were a jaunty scarf. By the very end, O’Brien was filthy and exhausted, retiring to his alter in a spent heap. The once-pristine set was now a battlefield strewn with medical refuse, splashed with slime. Like a scene from Caligula, O’Brien struck the pose of an orgy-exhausted emperor as he regained his breath and sprawled before us. It was time to exit. During Breathe for Me, I appreciated that O’Brien was not always “on” or “in the zone.” Dressed simply in a loose jockstrap, his performance persona was workmanlike, and he took breaks from his torments to drink water and eat a snack. He looked up at people who walked in and out, didn’t attempt to stifle any of his unscripted gasps or groans, and stretched his limbs when needed. As with the other artists, I had the opportunity to socialize with O’Brien over the weekend, to share meals and drinks, walks and taxi rides. This proximity further complicated and nuanced the collapse of “self” and “artwork” that occurs in these performances. Spending time with these human beings both “on” and “off,” thinking about difficulty in all its forms – from the most mundane tribulations to the headiest challenges of existence – helped me consider how, here and now, performance rooted in discomfort and duress can forge new aesthetic and affective possibilities. Jon Davies is a curator and writer based in Toronto.
2. I ACTUALLY DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF WHAT WAS GOOD, OR BAD Amy Lam This review by Onyeka Igwe isn’t so much a review as a thesaurus entry of words that are related to JudeoChristian religious terms. Maybe because I am a paganatheist, I felt immediately annoyed by having to think about performances that “are” devotional acts, or performance artists that “are” Lazarus. Actually, in the review it says that the artist Ron Athey is “at once” Lazarus and a demon. This example illustrates the main problem with this piece of writing: there’s so many terms that come from the Bible that nothing is specific and I actually don’t have a sense of what was good, or bad, about the first review. I understand that the exhibition itself – Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance – was set in a former church, so it makes sense to read this
Homo Monstrous (Leo Keiser and Jaye Kovach), How Fucking Loud Do I Have to Yell?, 2015, performance still, Performatorium, Regina, SK. image courtesy of the artists
and performatorium, regina
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Myfanwy MacLeod, Sweet Mary Jane, 2015 photo: scott massey; image courtesy of catriona
recaps, dressed up with non-daily-usage words. When I read a review, I want an assessment, contextualized with some information – through tone or content – about the personality or experience of the reviewer, so I can see where the opinion is coming from. form.” This sentence basically says that body art is the artist’s way of enacting her commitment to body art? Like: “the novelist announces, through her novel, her dedication to writing novels.” This review reminded me of other art reviews I’ve read that are more like diplomatic body art (the one type of performance art that is based around cutting your body or whatever) within some kind of religious or spiritual context (and that seems to be what the first review by Davies did). But this second review by Igwe never addresses Christianity’s organized hatred
jeffries gallery, vancouver
Scientology words (they have so many!). To finish off why I think this review says barely anything, here’s the sentence that begins the last paragraph: “Davies understands performance art as bodily sacrifice, the audience gathering around an altar to witness an artist’s devotion to the
The Age of Aquarius is the latest target of Vancouverbased artist Myfanwy MacLeod’s boisterous yet intellectually demanding satire. While rooted in the eclecticism of the ’70s New Age movement, her exhibition at Catriona Jeffries connects readily with the contemporary. Its title, Tell Her Nothing She Tells All – and the fact that the press release consists only of her artist bio – touches on the show’s internal tensions around access and knowledge. Its individual components are minimal in number but range from the glaringly explicit to the decidedly murky in their referents. The darkened gallery space holds a trio of neon signs that clearly indicate palm reading, chakras and the illuminati. Two plinths each bear a smallish, biomorphic sculpture made of some mysterious composite substance flecked with bright colours. A gigantic, goldframed print of a veined and mottled oval leans up against a wall, and an intricate, almost chaotically woven rug hangs nearby. A little shelf presents a whimsical tableau: a black and white photographic cutout of a Woodstock-esque hippie gazes at a rainbow figurine of some textured material on a stalk. This is the gist of what’s available to the eyes, and there is an opacity here that borders on disjunction with respect to the relationships between these objects. The titles – only available at the back of the gallery as a printout – are a powerful key to unlocking associations. The gold-framed oval is titled Churinga (2015). Often a polished, oblong piece of stone or wood, a churinga is a sacred object for many indigenous Australian cultures. This gives some clue as to the subject of MacLeod’s image: a magnified opal. But the sculptural material is stated as recycled yoga mats.
The titles of other pieces, Woman (2015) and Crown of Buds (2015), locate their sources in stone works by Isamu Noguchi and Jean Arp, respectively. The tableau is called Sweet Mary Jane I (2015): the miniature hippie is lounging with a “3D printed sandstone marijuana bud.” Much of this may well be immediately accessible to those who have some familiarity with Western art history, Australian indigenous cultures or marijuana on the vine (infamous BC bud), but it is an overall fairly obscure collection of references, and pinpointing the use of recycled yoga mats, for example, would be a very good guess, at best. Most viewers will learn at least something from the title list that reveals previously obscured connections, and may indeed need to do a bit of Googling, at least, to more fully decipher the significance of individual elements. As is typical of MacLeod’s practice, this exhibition is rife with art historical allusions. Woman and Crown of Buds are the most explicit examples (while also managing to look as if they might have been plucked from the hippie’s lava lamp). Her neons, particularly insofar as they are often imprecise – the pink hand of Five (2015), for example, looks as if it might have originally been traced with a crayon, as a child might do – seem to blatantly parody the austere, clean lines of minimalism, via Dan Flavin. As for Sweet Mary Jane, there is marked formal correspondence (not to mention a delicious pun) to be found with respect to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The pieces are connected by the relational arrangement of the figures and the specificities of the hippie’s pose: recumbent, propped on one elbow with one leg bent, gazing towards a feminine – or, here, nominally feminized – form. With MacLeod’s mischievous tactics, these allusions all implicate art history in dubious visionary claims, in hackneyed tropes of artists as hyper-perceptive beings capable of providing deeply valuable social insights – but only to those who are fluent in a rarified language . . . or who are capable of crossing assorted palms with sufficient silver. Any probing of Western history, artistic or otherwise, is also necessarily an engagement with gender, something MacLeod has explicitly addressed throughout her career. Her major show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013 was saturated with both lighthearted and sinister instances of macho swagger. On first
of queers or the politics of these themes, except for one weirdly contextualized quote from Davies’ review about “the righteous noise” of “trans rage.” So why lean so heavily on Bible junk? There’s also so many other words that could be used – Satanist words, Buddhist words,
Myfanwy MacLeod: Tell Her Nothing She Tells All Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver March 21–May 2, 2015 by Kyra Kordoski
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stepping into this gallery, the neon Oracle (2015) is the closest and brightest piece. Particularly with the phrase “Tell her nothing she tells all” in mind, its glowing white palm, crowned by the word “Psychic,” evokes the archetypal female fortuneteller who has wild hair, gold jewellery, kohl-rimmed eyes and who is quite likely a con artist – potentially powerful but decidedly suspect. Considering the gender imbalance that persists in the art world, one might well conclude that there is a comparable lack of confidence among female visual artists. The sculpted recycled yoga mats, meanwhile, comment on the degree of effort taken to aesthetically “shape” woman’s forms in art and life. This is pointedly underscored by the fact that Noguchi’s sculpture Woman (1969), while very pleasingly rounded, is basically a truncated chunk of body. MacLeod seems to have drawn a line between the mystical and the holy. There are no crosses nor Stars of David, nothing that would imply a church, mosque or temple; in this dimmed space, the candycoloured neon lights are a stark, commercial contrast to the candles generally associated with religious ritual. What emerges from the pink glow, then, is the Western colonial practice of treating the rest of the world as a not remotely sacrosanct buffet from which one can mix and match features of assorted cultures to suit oneself with little or no regard to the complexity of their origins. This again ties into Western art history, with its various phases of Chinoiserie and Primitivism: for example, the adoption of Moroccan rugs by the modernists. There is a disquieting flatness here insofar as sacred aboriginal objects and ancient Buddhist practices are conflated with psychic readings and getting high (the potential political implications of partying at Woodstock notwithstanding). And as far as churingas go, Australian museums typically refuse to exhibit these stones out of respect for aboriginal beliefs, because to do so would be painfully sacrilegious.1 So it is an extremely complicated gesture to name a gigantic artwork that is specifically intended to be exhibited in a gallery Churinga. It is also a damning comment on continued colonial practices. But it is debatable whether its lack of immediate transparency sharpens the statement, functioning as it does as part of the theoretical fabric of the show, or whether it collapses the piece into straightforward participation in such practices. It is vastly impressive how much of import can be taken from such a simple arrangement of objects, but considering the gravity of some of the issues she has invoked, MacLeod’s wit here, if anything, is too gently applied.
3. WHEREBY I BEG FOR THE AVOWAL OF A KIND OF OVERMIND Tiziana La Melia 1. i vexed three hunks of text to sext common sense in form, . . . third law forgot. It’s not a catalogue of thesaurus entry words. Simple, straightforward and sincere. Why is it a checklist of Judeo-Christian religious terms? Perhaps the structure is determined by annoyance. Hard to disguise form. As a pagan-atheist, the writer doesn’t want to see ritual as necessarily a spiritual or religious act. Must sacrifice, scapegoating or mythical figures brood in dualities: heaven & hell, good & evil? Irked, no doubt. Ron Athey is described as being both “Lazarus and a demon.” This is an example of how the review, laden with biblical references, says, “nothing is specific and I actually don’t have a sense of what was good, or bad, about the first review.” Seeking polemic. Was it the review, or the exhibition, that was good or bad? I’m not sure.
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Following the Ten Commandments School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Nov 13, 2014 – Feb 20, 2015 by Jessica Evans A commonly understood difference between the United States and Canada is the inclusion of religious influence in politics and policy, a dichotomy that is passionately debated by our southern neighbors while remaining relatively quiet among Canadians. The infusion of Christian doctrine within municipal space is a phenomenon explored in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s recent Following the Ten Commandments, an exhibition of 13 photographs of the Ten Commandments erected as monuments outside public institutions in the United States. Following from Robbins and Becher’s previous studies on “the transportation of place” and the resulting cultural overlap and contradictions, Following the Ten Commandments relays the trope of American values, and the inconsistencies therein. Your first impression might be to smirk at the obvious conflation of Church and State, depicted matter-offactly in the photographs, though not without humour. Each image presents a drab, authoritative public building flanked by the Ten Commandments on a manicured boulevard. The aesthetic incongruity between the monuments and the state property (in some of the images the statues are awkwardly placed on grassy knolls or wedged next to stop signs) underscores the unsettling juxtaposition of ecclesiastical principles with a so-called neutral justice system. Perhaps more ludicrously, the tablets that represent – according to the Bible – the liberation of Hebrew slaves from Egypt are installed at the entrances of government
Kyra Kordoski is a writer based on the Canadian West Coast. Endnote 1 “Controversy over Aboriginal sacred stone,” Australian Geographic (2011), accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2011/09/controversy-over-aboriginal-sacred-stone.
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institutions that maintain the highest incarceration rates in the world. Although references to God pervade American currency, the national anthem and legal oaths, the monuments, in their stark physical form, go beyond phrasing and impose an unmistakably dogmatic order of morals. According to US federal law, religious symbols are allowed on government property if that property is open to all religious expression. Following the Ten Commandments thus comprises monuments gifted by private citizens and organizations, which complicates the assumption of state approval. The process through which the statues find themselves on state property may be democratic, but their presence still remains oppressive to many. The monument seen in the image Oklahoma State Capitol, Oklahoma was erected in 2009 and was contested in lawsuits filed by the aclu and American Atheists Inc., until a vandal destroyed it with his truck in 2014. The controversy surrounding the erection of flagrantly Judeo-Christian symbolism has extended beyond atheists and people of other religions. When the Supreme Court decreed that the monuments could serve a primarily nonreligious “historical” purpose, many Christians balked at the reclassification of what they see as a sacred object. Ultimately, the object and iconography becomes caught in the plight between freedom from and freedom to. Becher and Robbins’ photographs are uniform in their depictions of imperious courthouses and town halls amid bucolic landscapes of green grass and blue sky. The injection of the fiery Old Testament into the sleepy, suburban landscape is jarring in a manner distinct from the flags and official insignia that decorate the buildings. Within the large, colour photos, the images eschew formal reductions to landscape or even documentary genre, occasionally conveying the placid manner of a real-estate ad or the utilitarian images conjured by Google maps. Printed on perforated mesh generally used for outdoor exhibitions, the photographs inadvertently recall the diffusion of pixels and the distortion of led screens. Black borders punctuated with grommets augment the conceptual parallels between contemporary and commercial photography; it is easy to imagine these works strapped to a highway signpost or public park as meta-monument. Foremost, the locus of each image is the relationship
between the tablets and the surrounding environment. In Bradford County, Starke, Florida the black-and-white stone monument stands in high contrast to the formalist courthouse. Converging lines and the geometric courtyard create the impression that the statue is positioned onstage in an amphitheater, reverberating with sovereignty. Conversely, in Fields of The Wood, Murphy, North Carolina an aerial view shows gigantic tablets drawn across an entire hillside, reminiscent of a football field’s simple design and scope, yet somehow characterless and dull. Throughout the 13 photographs in Following the Ten Commandments, the architectural touchstones switch between the grand and the unremarkable. Likewise, their accompanying monuments are displayed with equivalent variation; some monuments stand at the gate with flags and distinction, while others are innocuously placed amid shrubbery like bird feeders. What endures, for Becher and Robbins, is the object. The platonic landmark, which identifies and orientates both the location and the visitor, provides the pivot of the photographs and incorporates Robbins and Becher’s method of curated tourism. Their previous work addressed the idiosyncrasies of geography and heritage by documenting subcultures or small communities that have manufactured culture as theme park. Here, the inhabitants of the locales are noticeably absent, their presence superseded by the wraith of stone podiums. Resonating throughout each photo is the conundrum of resolving the American fixation on rebellion and individualism with stalwart commitment to tradition. This is supplemented by the locations displayed: the jumble of architectural references (Rome, modernist monoliths) mirrored by the monuments’ varying artistry (some totally unembellished, some imbued with kitschy drama) is unmistakably American. Robbins’ and Becher’s images become repetitive compositions of civil architecture, landscaping and adornment, all of which approach the paradox of how a country with such expansive social diversity can all look the same. Following the Ten Commandments details the anomaly of the United States, where even controversies become homogenous. Jessica Evans is an artist and writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Fields of the Wood, Murphy, North Carolina (2012-2014). photo © andrea robbins and max becher
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Possible Futures: What is to be done? The Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art,at the Art Gallery of Windsor, ON; the Leamington Arts Centre, Leamington, ON; The Vollmer Culture and Recreation Complex, LaSalle, ON; Drouillard Road, Ford City and the Capitol Theatre, Windsor, ON. Oct 4, 2014 – Jan 11, 2015 by Pearl Van Geest Possible Futures was not futuristic. There were no predictions for the future and few prescriptions for a better one. The exhibition instead suggested that we view both the present and recent past as a cautionary tale, and invent a future from what we have produced in excess and discarded. Given that the original exhibition call had asked for stories of response, renewal and re-imaginings for a post-industrial era, I was not expecting to be left with such a residual sense of mourning after touring the show’s five exhibition sites. For many of the 29 participating artists, who were from southwestern Ontario, Eastern Michigan, Windsor-Essex and Detroit, current socio-economic conditions in the region overshadow positive future possibilities. After all, these areas have been hit especially hard by downsizing across multiple sectors, including farming, manufacturing and retail. Evidence of this decline can be seen in empty store windows, a growing population of feral cats, and neighbourhood upon neighbourhood of boarded-up houses, deserted except for patrols of private security companies. And yet artists, activists and community leaders across this region have recently begun to work together in ways that more prosperous centres might envy.
It is into this milieu that the Art Gallery of Windsor curator Srimoyee Mitra assembled artists for a triennial centered around the question of Possible Futures: What is to be done? In response, artists such as the collective th&b examine the present from an imagined future that reflects back upon our current circumstances, exposing waste and surplus. Their work, Core Sample, appeared as if some alien visitors or our future selves had dug below the pavement to reveal, not soil, but strata of discarded clothes, trinkets and stuff in a squished profusion of colour. For other artists, a possible future is a retreat from the present and a future surrounded by an increasingly obsolescent past. Mike Marcon’s Shack, made from scavenged materials, is stocked with provisions and old communication devices. Visitors are not welcome; a rifle is suspended from the ceiling and aimed at the door – presumably rigged to shoot when the door is opened. Nearby, Laura Moore’s one man’s junk also addresses the constant unexamined future that is pressed upon us by pervasive upgrades. This is our monument to the present: a pile of obsolete computers finely carved out of stone and piled haphazardly onto a shipping pallet. More optimistically, for artists such as Kiki Athanassiadis from Windsor and Kate Daughdrill from Detroit, “what is to be done” is to get down to work – with community engagement, imagination and cooperation. Athanassiadis is committed to investigating the idea that downtown Windsor’s vacant lots are sites of potential whose future should be determined not necessarily by professional planners, developers and bureaucrats but by city residents. She creates workshops where participants are guided through a process designed to open up new possibilities however fanciful. Desire and the City: A Citizen’s Abandoned-lot Design Consultancy is exhibited in the art gallery as a workroom that contains traces of an ongoing process. Meanwhile, Daughdrill deliberately blurs the line between food production and art production at her urban Burnside Farm in Detroit, where community shareholders receive a variety of creative produce art objects along with garden produce - in exchange for their monetary support. The spectrum of canned produce and medicinal herbs sits across from a pile of grey cast rocks by Donna Akrey that have been pushed up against the opposite wall, with the word 2. Vertical form was taught to me by Mr. M. — bitter, childless, suspicious of lip-gloss (conspiracy theories drenched in ironic tone, assuming giggle and a room full of “in one ear, out the other”), a student of Tolkien, divorced. A review of a performance is a performance. The second paragraph sets the stage to the stage, admitting why this kind of body art resonates with Catholic rites. Failure to remark on the church’s intolerances, towards queers for example, adds to the peeve. The final sentence of the second paragraph is emotional like the final sentence of the first paragraph. It begs for alternative words. Whereby, I beg for the avowal of a kind of overmind, sober and rococo.
Charlie O’Geen, Limber (Zero Drouillard Road), 2014; installation view at Possible Futures: What is to be done? The Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art image courtesy of the art gallery of windsor
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“sorry” raised in relief on each rock’s surface. Written
in stone, it is as if we could never apologize enough. Perhaps that’s what our future holds: having to say sorry over and over again. The exhibition continued at four off-site venues not normally used to exhibit contemporary art. At the Vollmer Culture and Recreation Complex in LaSalle, a 1989 Oldsmobile sat out front, its interior painted “merlot” and outfitted with a wall of speakers playing a soundscape composed from recorded ambient sounds. Sitting in this purple-pink dreamcar ii, a work by Marco D’Andrea, conjured moments of suspended time and was a hypnotic ride into the future. But confronting the figures loitering throughout the Complex was the moment that the dream turned nightmarish and strange. Sitting on benches or leaning against walls as if waiting for friends, these figures seemed ordinary at first glance. But upon closer inspection they turned out to be groups of wild creatures such as squirrels, skunks, raccoons and owls, who emerged out of parkas, hoodies and pants. This piece, Brandon Vickerd’s Passenger 11, haunted my conscience, demanding that we reflect upon our relationship with the other animals whose territory we share. Unexpectedly coming upon columns of crushed cars in a vacant lot in Windsor’s Ford City neighbourhood also evoked a moment of wonder. Charlie O’Geen’s Limber (Zero Drouillard Road) straddles the line between architecture and art installation, and could be seen either as a ruin or the framework for a new structure, suggesting that crushed cars could be used as the foundations for buildings. Here is a possible future built out of a past that is neither hidden nor disguised, but reconfigured. What initially seemed dark, desperate and post-apocalyptic became a fascinating and hopeful image of the future. Ambitious in its thematic proposition, Possible Futures didn’t present us with a collection of roadmaps to the future, but rather placed provocations among stories of building community from what industry has abandoned. It demanded of us that we not only engage with the question of “What is to be done?” but also that we also look unflinchingly at “What have we done?” so that we are not carried into a terrible future that is our own unmaking.
Krista Belle Stewart: Seraphine, Seraphine Mercer Union, Toronto March 13 – April 25, 2015 by Yaniya Lee
In 2009, as Krista Belle Stewart was on her way to a residency at the Banff Centre, her mom, Seraphine, handed her a vhs cassette and asked her to transfer it to a digital file. It was a cbc documentary made about her in 1967 that she had up until then kept a secret from her children. In a series of re-enactments, Seraphine: Her Own Story Told By Seraphine Ned recounts her experience living off of the reserve and studying to become one of the first Native nurses in British Columbia. After Stewart accompanied her mother to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2013, she obtained a video of Seraphine’s testimonial and began making work that combined it with the earlier documentary. She has since shown parts of the films in different iterations at the Esker Foundation, Artspeak and as a public art project for the City of Vancouver’s “Year of Reconciliation.” It’s as though Stewart has had to engage these archival documents from a variety of perspectives to find exactly how to make them speak a different story. Many of Stewart’s previous research, photography, film and performance projects have used archival materials to reconsider media representations of Indigenous people and their histories, often opening up a dialogue between past and present, and privileging instances of Indigenous self-representation. As a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, she was one of 13 Indigenous photographers selected by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada to photograph living conditions in First Nations communities across Canada. While a student at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, she spent time in Germany attending the Karl May Festival and learning about the Indianer-Klub and the German obsession with Native American culture. Last year, during a residency at the Nisga’a Museum she had an 87-yearold photograph of a woman chief, originally taken by a Tsimshian photographer, entirely reproduced in wool as a weaving work. For her solo exhibition Seraphine, Seraphine at Mercer Union, Stewart edited her mother’s docu-drama and trc testimonial down to a 38-minute, two-channel video installation. In black and white new-wave style, replete with jazzy soundtrack and copious close-ups, Seraphine: Her Own Story draws a picture of In-digenous assimilation into Canadian society using Seraphine’s experience as an example. In the film, she plays the part of herself in re-enactments that highlight her social alienation away from the reservation. In one crucial scene, during a visit to the residential school of her childhood in Kamloops, she chats politely
Pearl Van Geest is an artist, arts educator and writer who recently returned to Guelph, ON after completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Windsor.
3. The end? I mime. This review of a review of a review does not progress from discovery made through writing, writing that blushed by making itself seen. My bias. Loathing cliché, yet enacting other prescriptions. List risky dichotomies. The analysis that fades on the wish for a prose, stripped bare. I enjoy the way this review reads precisely how I imagine the writer would talk. I say that while also wanting to stick on a face, make(ing) up, how I talk, how I write – and to add a final peeve to your pet, lack “personality.”
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with the school’s priest and plays with the young stu- of Seraphine’s residential school experience proves how dents. The storytelling in the film is mostly wordless at odds the perspective of the cbc filmmaker is with and romanticizes her life. Her demeanour, for in- the trc, a process of healing and reconciliation meant stance, remains stoic the whole time, much like the to generate an official archive of survivor testimonifamiliar stereotype of the unsmiling, stoic Indian. als. Next to Seraphine’s unadorned trc testimonial, Or, while her husband and small child appear else- the assimilationist ideology that so casually underpins where in the film, there is her awkward date with a the docu-drama’s creation is blatant. Though it is oswhite man, establishing her sexual availability as a tensibly Seraphine’s story, its orchestration by white, polite, Pocahontas-style Indian Princess. male director Richard Bocking and a crew of five Forty-six years later, framed in a single, fixed colour other men performs a well-intentioned whitewashing shot, Seraphine’s charm animates her trc testimonial. of the residential school system. In 1967, Seraphine’s She talks about her brothers and sisters, her relation- image is used as an example of successful Indigenous ship to her parents, the ways in which residential integration, but, as she shares decades later in her school dehumanized her, and the emotional toll of trc testimonial, this success was at the cost of her learning to survive in that environment. She seems childhood and her culture. But even this represenhappy as she speaks about the beading she wants to tation can’t be seen as neutral. Though Canada’s trc do, and her husband’s dedication to berry picking, is paid for by funds from the compensation awardnow intent on maintaining a connection to the prac- ed to the Indian Residential Schools Survivors Society, tices and traditions she lost when she was separated it is administered by government-appointed commisfrom her family as a girl. Side by side, the two screens sioners, the same federal government that continues go blank at intervals, sometimes overlapping and to uphold the Indian Act legislation that once manother times letting room for one or the other story dated attendance at residential schools. to unfold. Next to the severe artificiality of the docuIn Seraphine, Seraphine, Stewart enacts the kind drama, the honesty and the intimacy of Seraphine’s of self-representation sought by Challenge for Change, story is deeply affecting. albeit in a more deeply personal way. Assimilationist The concurrent solo exhibition at Mercer Union, ideology continues to play a key role in the mechaChallenge for Change/Société nouvelle: Documents in Parti- nisms of colonialism and in this work intimate mocipatory Democracy, provides a context for thinking ments of one family’s personal history shed light on about the politics of representation in Stewart’s piece. some of the problems with our nation-building proJacqueline Hoang Nguyen curated a selection of doc- ject as a whole. Reclaiming these archival documents umentaries from the National Film Board’s Challenge from the context of their creation, a made-for-TV for Change program. Recognizing the agency that could documentary (cbc) and an inquiry into residential be generated through self-representation, the nfb schools (trc), and showing them together, Stewart handed filmmaking tools to different struggling co- destabilizes the authority they might have if watchmmunities. Single mothers in urban centres, First ed alone. The edited conversation between past and Nations like the Mohawks of the St. Regis Reserve, present representations makes clear the ideological and remote communities like Newfoundland’s Fogo parameters and production imperatives that structurIsland were all empowered to tell their stories, in their ed how Seraphine was allowed to share her experience. own way. From 1967 to 1980, the documentaries they Stewart’s formal strategies bring a new sovereignty to produced showed in-depth subjective perspectives her mother’s story, and in this way she accomplishes on poverty, discrimination, inequity and sovereignty. the difficult work of creating a decolonial aesthetic. In Canada, the either/or discourse of assimilation or reservation for First Nations has historically been Yaniya Lee is a writer and interviewer based in Toronto. maintained by very precise ways of representing Indigenous people and cultures. The disjunction in Seraphine, Seraphine between the two representations
4. BOTH A CONDENSATION AND FRAYING OF THOUGHT Raymond Boisjoly Tiziana La Melia’s review of Amy Lam’s review of the review that came before her, and by extension, perhaps the larger process of the project of Rearviews itself, begins with a chunk of italicized text with very particular line breaks, calling attention to its literary character as poetry and, by contrast, to the review as a literary genre. What if the review took as its task the production of an experience akin to that produced by the work being discussed? La Melia’s focus moves between the review being reviewed and the context of her own review. She provides a summary of points that are intensified by brief statements following her longer considerations: “Irked, no doubt,” “Seeking polemic,” “I’m not sure.” These brief statements suggest both a condensation and fraying of thought. Rearviews, a review of a review
Krista Belle Stewart, Seraphine: Her Own Story, 2014, digital two channel video, 38:57 min. photo: toni hafkenscheid; image courtesy of the artist and mercer union, toronto
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privileged position, allowing for other actions to be emphasized, such as the ostensibly real rather than feigned drama of the internal conflicts concerning the various film crews’ questioning of Greaves’ production method. The impact of Greaves’ film, and perhaps Rearviews itself, is that the complete and tured the actors rehearsing a scripted scene of relationship strife in Central Park, the second crew shot the first crew and the third documented anything on the periphery that seemed relevant to the story and larger film, mostly cops it seems. The complex dynamic of this film denies the scripted narrative a
The clock has come to orchestrate the passage of the day as we conduct our work and leisure, and complete our errands according to its measures of duration. It can prompt a feeling of time dragging on or moving too fast, reminding us of what has already been done or still needs to be accomplished. In Krista Buecking’s exhibition at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto, matters of fact, the minimalist design of a clock overhead, titled matters of fact (all things being equal), creates structure as one spends time deciphering the colours and arrangement of the geometric graphs on display. The uppercase letters in the title assert authority, resounding an element of truth, though the artist applies a playful and aesthetic pursuit to challenge these assumptions. The bracketed title for the clock, (all things being equal), suggests equality in the system of measurement broken into segments by the clock. However, this does not compensate for how one operates within this timeframe. The inequality of evaluating labour is a theme here that Buecking makes apparent in her images. The artist’s approach of using symbolic languages also brings attention to the objective and abstract systems that work to describe and simplify many aspects of reality. The first image, matters of fact (codified form A), depicts the jagged ascent and then steeper descent of a yellow line over a soft, misty, ultramarine gradient. With a simple mark, associations of both finance and the sublime are connoted with a minimalist depiction of a pointed mountain peak, which also resembles a graph signifying capital accumulation. One can assume that the various diagrams painted on Plexiglas throughout the first floor of the exhibition relay information about progress or decline in the neoliberal system, while their shapes cast shadows on the gradient beneath.
A soundtrack of self-help dialogues, teen melodramas and infomercial catchphrases can be heard throughout the lower level of the gallery. If one considers the title of the exhibition while listening, they might ask, what could be the matter? As Bruno Latour points out, matters of fact have depleted in meaning and value, whereas matters of concern have become more apt in addressing whatever the issues are at hand. We can no longer think of objects as pure matters of fact since they are, as Latour describes it, far more “variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material and networky”1 than we credit them as being. Buecking’s work seems to echo this sentiment. Matters of fact have increasingly become disputable and abstract. As such, the dialogue and canned music are as humorous as they are comforting, addressing a more subjective engagement that is associated more appropriately perhaps with matters of concern. The title itself also implies that there is a direct relationship with matter. Buecking has stated that “the longing, effort and sacrifice that separate us from objects are also supposed to lead us towards them.” The symbolic systems developed by modernist abstraction, early education programs and economic representations referred to here are semiotic systems that attempt to reveal an understanding of material things. Whether they are effective or not, Buecking highlights both a discrepancy and curiosity associated with these languages. Viewing these images with a clock looming over the gallery space means the familiar aphorism “time is money” is hard to dismiss. Time is another abstraction, and dwelling on the fact that everything involves or takes time is unavoidable within this exhibition. It is made visible as viewers are encouraged to consider aspects of labour and value as they take their time contemplating the works on display. The steady and slow pace of contemplation is met with the (puritan) anxieties of whether one’s time was worthwhile or well spent. The gradients themselves are made by hand with pencil crayon, laboriously mimicking that which is seen as a fill-in for context on computer screens. In contrast to the simplified graphs and symbols painted on the Plexiglas, Buecking’s f lawless transition of colours can easily be read as computer-
of a review of a review of a review of… an exhibition? This is a writing exercise akin to William Greaves’ 1968 film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, wherein Greaves hired three film crews to document the varying levels of reality offered by the process of narrative filmmaking. The first film crew cap-
Krista Buecking: MATTERS OF FACT Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto Feb 26—April 4, 2015 By Karina Irvine
Krista Beucking, MATTERS OF FACT (equivalent forms, manipulatives), 2015, MDF, wood, presentation pad and easel, tropical standard foliage, 152.5 x 183 x 183 cm photo: toni hafkenscheid; image courtesy of the artist and susan hobbs gallery, toronto
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Karina Irvine is an emerging curator and freelance writer. Endnote
they are recording: “It doesn’t really make any difference at this point whether Bill’s direction is good or bad, Bill’s direction has brought us here together to talk, compelled us even to be interested that way.” Set
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Backstage dramas happen to be my favourite movie genre, and I’m
5. A PREDECESSOR TO REALITY TV Oliver Husain
thankful to Raymond Boisjoly for pointing towards Symbiopsychotaxiplasm – Take One (1968), a film that could be described as a backstage drama, a predecessor to reality TV, or, as Raymond suggests,
1 Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005) p. 21.
immediate access to the primary materials that inaugurated the process itself is impossible because the frame may always be widened, and the distance from the action becomes irreducible so that the work is denied any capacity for transparency and simply seeks another means to call attention to itself or its premise.
as a model for excessive use of framing devices. I’m watching it right now, at the moment of writing. In the film, the discussions of the crew about the absent director are more intense than the dramatic scenes
generated, raising questions about the value of the effort required to make these works by hand. Therefore, these images create a metaphor for labour, where the effort and time that creating things takes is increasingly devalued or overlooked. Her series of hand-coloured pastel gradients creates pause through subtlety, bringing attention to this gap between labour, time and value. On the upper level at Susan Hobbs Gallery, a collection of geometric shapes and a flip chart are displayed on a raised white platform (equivalent forms, manipulatives), a stage with large ferns as its backdrop. The ferns themselves perhaps allude to the office appeal of purchasing plants to represent capital growth. Growth in itself is an abstract concept, insinuating an escalation of linear progression and that there is room for expansion. Curiously, Parliament Hill’s plants were put on the auction block last year due to budget cuts affecting their hydration. These ferns are emblematic of those seen in offices and businesses, providing what little green can be seen amongst cubicles or on desks. Those auctioned off as a result of budgeting provide an example of Buecking’s critique of the abstract values and symbolic language used in today’s corporate society, exposing the somewhat comical and misguided stress placed on emblems that signify progress. Buecking presents matters of fact as elusive, surrounded by systems that break down information, meditating on the semiotic and material while considering the discrepancies in value and false ideals of progress. An overarching question asks, “how do we grasp objects through design? What is the aesthetic and symbolic reality we find ourselves in, and what does it really mean?”
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TEMPERAMENTAL Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto Jan 5—Feb 14, 2015 by Ben Portis
temperamental had a bubbling, troubling carnival appeal. Its zones intersected like Venn diagrams around which spectators roamed, related and located the artworks’ changing valences in a variety of inclusive/exclusive sets. Self and social linked in initiation; solace and signal in display; silence and celebration in dance; present and past in nostalgia. temperamental fully came to life during its opening and ongoing public programs. Without a crowd, though, the empty gallery maintained a standby readiness with its video automata and latent, looming icons. Behavioural flux and emotional flutter in alternating phases were only the reactive manifestations of curator Erin Silver’s aptly titled exhibition; its recurring counterpoints were deftly declarative, a queered flick of the wrist, flash of the brow or flip of the locks. Ten Hair posters (2012–ongoing) by Mark Clintberg lined the showcase outside the gallery like so many hustlers. Each reproduced a cheap, faded, monotone barbershop head shot, an outmoded cut bobbing atop a chiselled yet vulnerable face. Then just inside the vestibule, just before the threshold to hubbub and hoopla, a faintly echoing forlornness, Clintberg’s Quiet Disco (2013), an LP recording of a dance party, is heard ruefully through walls as from a place one is excluded. If you even noticed it (as any actual activity nearby neutralized its muffled audibility), you might assume an unwitting complicity, lift the needle and replay the soundtrack of ostracism. Ironically, given Clintberg’s own history of creating empty, waiting stages, Quiet Disco looked sidelong through a glass wall into a pristine, conch-pink theatre behind the shit-spangled curtain of Hazel Meyer’s diarrhea (2014). That work’s proscenium faced into the gallery and the drapes glided apart at the flick of a whip. To close yourself within diarrhea was to inhabit an incubatory sanctum. No one, to my knowledge, put on an impromptu performance. However a parallel talent show, Boy Band Audition (2013)—almost exactly as billed, just not limited to boys—created and hosted by Alexandro Segade and Mateo Segade, was one of the participatory events that took temperamental into the exponential dimensions of its concept. Across from Meyer’s curtain were 12 panels from Will Munro’s Mirror series (2005). Each was emblazoned with a pink logo, copied or adapted from the golden era of punk discotheques, from late-’70s Manhattan (The Mudd Club) to 2000s Toronto (Vaseline), the latter rendered à la New York Dolls, a tube of oil paint replacing the lipstick. The attitude was simultaneously antechamber, dance floor and bathroom, another oddly inert, codified party that offered grim relief to the pained and conflicted expressions that lay beyond. Elizabeth Price’s The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012) was given a cinematic treatment on par with its spooky complexity. The piece is a narrative cycle in three chapters: (i) “The Auditorium” illustrating ecclesiastical
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in a claustrophobic, brightly lit storage space, their processing feels alarmingly familiar. Imagine them stepping out of this self-reflective interior illusions lounge onto an impossible stage, where the mirror reflections are kaleidoscopic, spiralling cascades circling without limits in every direction. In the classic backstage dramas of studio Hollywood, for example, Ziegfeld Girl (1941), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) or Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), melodramatic narratives are interrupted by elaborate musical sequences. While the drama happens in some sort of real world scenario, bound by the destructive forces of gravity, class struggle and gender roles, the musical numbers are staged in a levitating, limitless, imaginary film space. They are set in a different ontological space altogether, a variable space that can only be constructed with film. Fluctuating architectures, built by movement and montage are
hierarchy and heavenward majesty in the design of the medieval English cathedral choir; (ii) “The Chorus,” portraying the decorous flamboyance of the ShangriLas, the ’60s girl group whose repertoire gained afterlife in the trans-songstress culture of The Stonewall Inn and the trans-glam provocations of the New York Dolls; and (iii) “The Fire,” about the Woolworth fire in Manchester, in which a storage area stacked with upholstered chairs (analogous to the tiered seating of the choir) self-ignited, the ensuing conflagration claiming 10 lives. Alternations between chorale and liturgy, chorus and verse, correlating to reason and rationale, lamentation and glorification, supplied the pulse to Price’s elliptical choreography of image and allusion. Formalized dance featured considerably in the opposite gallery. Brendan Fernandes’ wall text, The Call (2014), read “looking for: / strong / and otherwise authoritative bodies,” the desirous language of ardour sublimated in a demand of arduous labour. The latter implication was instilled during the opening enactment of Still Move (2014), a choreographic sculpture in which three dancers clad in underwear pressed numerous semi-hard rubber balls against the gallery walls with their bodies. Even disregarding its threehour duration in a busy space, Still Move plainly imposed discomfort and restriction on its performers, conditions conveyed far more casually and anonymously in six corresponding photographs, each depicting a single ball resting upon a ridge of knotted musculature. Emily Roysdon collaborated with mpa to realize Sense and Sense (2010), a video installation/performance document portraying a gangly, struggling space walk across the plaza of Sergels torg, Stockholm’s central civic square which, among other functions, serves as a site for public protest. mpa lies on her side, feet planted on nothing, propelling herself along with palm moves, rolling muscles and pantomime strides. The two-channel projections up-tilted the trianglepatterned pavement. An overhead medium shot isolates mpa, as if free climbing a sheer vertical wall; a longer aerial shot also encompasses ordinary pedestrians, who give the performer wide berth. Her illusionistic action achieves real public presence and yet it floats, perpetually disconnected from the passing world.
For taisha paggett, her would-be pure fulfilment in dance entails offsetting personal anxieties. In A Composite Field (2014), a three-channel video installation/ performance document, paggett enters entangled, practically straitjacketed, by a beige man’s blazer from which she wriggles free. Wearing a monochrome uni-form of matching trousers, white button-up shirt and necktie, she dances in a style indicative of classes she took with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Her performance arouses myriad tensions around gender, sexuality, race, class, age, education and virtuosity. The projections, lined up in a row, played different presentations of the dance in out-of-phase segments. A Composite Field thus seemed to unfold laterally across the gallery wall, as well as temporally within any given frame, a perception reinforced by what appear to be chromatic wipes of analogue signal extraction and corresponding tonal noise. They were in fact the live light-and-sound design by Yann Novak. An excellent online catalogue with essays by Silver and Amelia Jones emphasizes correspondences between performance syntaxes of the ’60s and ’70s, either technical or gestural, and contemporary queered political affects. If anything, temperamental dismantled wellmeaning conventions with which queer identities get socially calibrated, assimilated and “straightened.” Kim Kielhofner stunningly confounded the butch– femme spectrum along which she freely travels. Her Black Book Project (2005–ongoing) presented 32 open diaries filled with drawings, photographs, notes and self-reflexive facsimiles of pages from previous volumes. They offered variously sentimental, defiant and disaffected glimpses at fugitive self-identity, reconciled with respect to ephemeral certitudes of place and relationship, memory and intimacy. In foursquare (2011), Kielhofner’s four-channel video installation composed of rapidly edited texts, archival footage and cinematic clips, the artist or her viewpoint reappeared fleetingly, usually in solitude, ever in transit. Both projects traced temperamental youth ebbing away, while distinguishing the marks, colours and claims it leaves on the psyche. Ben Portis lives in Toronto. He is the curator of Broken Colours, opening at Nicholas Metivier Gallery in July 2015.
Hazel Meyer, diarrhea, 2015, installation view. image courtesy of the artist and the doris mccarthy gallery, toronto
offering solutions to the dilemmas of backstage realism through new impossible vectors. In this way, backstage dramas work towards the same effects as experimental cinema, but getting there from the opposite direction. Primary materials, though increasingly distant, appear mutable in the refractions of an expanding kaleidoscope.
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Eleanor King: Dark Utopian Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Halifax, Nova Scotia Jan 16—June 14, 2015 by Henry Adam Svec
6. WE MIGHT HAVE TO FOCUS ON THE MOMENTUM Mohammad Salemy To activate cinema’s epistemological utility, rather than focusing on a particular film or considering the medium in isolation, we need to place it in the middle of a longer media history stretching on one end to painting and on the other to the dominant media ecology of the age of telecomputation.* In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, also known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, is a general mathematical formula that places a fundamental limit on the exactitude with
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” as Oscar Wilde put it, “for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” 1 Eleanor King’s recent exhibition, Dark Utopian, scours maps and diagrams of various scales for a better place that does not exist. Whether or not this interdisciplinary assemblage denotes a route to utopia, however, is a provocatively open question. Rather than offering legible instructions to paradise, King sets the viewer adrift across the smooth spaces of modernity, forcing us to reckon not only with an “impossible” destination, but also with the murky desires that might drive us there. The main room of the exhibition is dominated by a massive wall painting, Deepwater Horizon (BP), whose vibrant hues and stunning stripes reach from floor to ceiling and around the gallery’s winding walls. King has taken a standard cartographic view of the coastline, from Halifax to New York City, and exploded it with cool colours and angular contours – a bird’s eye representation washing out into abstract, mechanical patterning. It is an exhilarating image. The dazzle painting style to which she alludes was used by the British to disguise ships during the First World War (it also found its way into paintings by nscad president and Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer); but King’s gesture highlights contemporary reverberations of this colonial heritage, too, for both sea and
land – and art – have become prime real estate. Indeed, from the point of view of corporations like British Petroleum, the whole world is a site of value extraction, what Martin Heidegger has called a “standing reserve,” just waiting to be called to productive action.2 Is King’s dazzle camouflage a defensive manoeuvre, then, an attempt to conceal both the map’s territory (and the map) from the hungry gaze of capitalists and speculators? Extending the nautical and navigational themes is the sculpture Rafts. Two small punts lie in the middle of the gallery floor – the rickety vessels seemingly engaged in a vaguely sexual coupling, soft blue mounted onto faded yellow. As with the wall map, there is a medium-specific attention to materiality in the visually pleasing and playful work, arresting given its gothic minimalism. Yet, these found objects also introduce the question of political-aesthetic translation. Are such beautiful and cleverly positioned things to be desired or consumed? (Not owned, one would presume, since they are listed as materials only “borrowed” from actor John Dunsworth.) Or, are we meant to wonder about their usefulness as actual tools for survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? King has us scuttling between the gallery, the coastal province of Nova Scotia and the ideal society. The other works in the main room focus more on aesthetics than pragmatics. Wormholes vi, vii, viii are large drawings on paper that have been imposed onto the wall painting like digital pop-up windows. With coloured pencils, King has repeatedly traced the shape of the Compact Disc and the vinyl LP to burrow winding, cascading paths, which bump into one another but do not manage to connect. In a similar vein, the sculpture CD Worm is a stack of old CDs shaped into a bent tower – like a creature reaching up for rain. There is a less obvious connection between these meditations on the materiality of sonic media and the show as a whole, but conceptually they continue to riff on the themes of drive, utility and despair. It is as though King’s quest for utopia continues, but here in distinct media and forms rather than in geographical locations. In the title work Dark Utopian, a video and sound piece that plays in a second room, we perhaps get the clearest articulation of the artist’s political vision.
Eleanor King, Deepwater Horizon (BP), 2015, latex paint in Arcadia Blue, Manhattan Blue, New York State of Mind, Midtown, Gotham Gray, Intercoastal Gray, Come Sail Away, Spinnaker, Less Traveled, El Capitan, Prophetic Sea, Free Spirit, Terrain, Black Evergreen, Porter Green, Nova White, Home Sweet Home, 49.7 x 3.5 m, with Deepwater Horizon Rafts, 2015, reclaimed (borrowed) punts, and Wormhole VIII (l) and VII (r), 2015, coloured pencil on paper, each 138 x 152 cm. photo: steve farmer; image courtesy of diaz
contemporary, toronto
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Via a recording of a Google Earth tour, we float slowly down the coastline (facing the land, not the sea), from Halifax to New York City and then back again. It is an eerily claustrophobic, lonely ride. We are also treated to a didactic protest song of sorts, though far from the optimistic anthems of the folksingers of the mid-20th century. King herself sings plaintively, her voice echoing, her electric guitar ringing slow arpeggios: “We’re so confused / We have no clue / How to get out of the mess we’re in / Is there no light at the end?” The earnest and melancholy tune is played loud enough to float faintly through the entirety of the space, giving the whole show a frosty, quizzical glaze. Theorists and artists alike have worked to reimagine utopia over the past decades. Utopia is not necessarily a rigid framework to be imposed onto society; according to Ruth Levitas, it is only “a desire for a better way of being.” 3 As is suggested by the exhibit’s title, Dark Utopian is not all sunshine and rainbows and relational aesthetics, and there is a decidedly void affective energy running through it. Yet, it is in King’s ambivalence and high-punk aesthetic that we see her utopianism’s potential. It is in between – along the cold channels of our global systems, like seaways and Google Earth and digital networks and even the institutions of contemporary art – that we find our dwelling places, and that is where we need to do the hard work of desiring to be better together, for now. Henry Adam Svec is a writer and scholar who is moving to Jackson, Mississippi. Endnotes 1 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Boston: J.W. Luce and Company, 1910). 2 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 3 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
electricity, sound recording and television to the planetary omnipresence of digital screens? Cinema was the first medium that automated (with the precision of 24 frames per second)
Exhibitions
the method for tapping into the raw potential of mass attentional resources for the purpose of aggregating generic mass-memory. If cinema provides us with prepackaged building blocks of
which opposing properties of a particle can be known simultaneously. The more precisely the position of some particle is known, the less precisely its momentum can be measured, and vice versa. In our context of opposite pairs, “momentum” stands for the mass and velocity of a moving object, and “position,” its precise place at a given moment. Thus, if accuracy can only be achieved in regards to either the momentum or position of a thing, then we might have to focus on the momentum and speculate on the movement and transformation of our object of analysis and not its exact position or identity. In this regard, we ought to think backwards and ask – what has been the real movement of cinema, if not a long trajectory via photography,
memory, the Internet has made the memory production more diverse and democratized. *telecomputation refers to the ever expanding space of knowledge which is generated by
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Eileen Quinlan: Double Charlie Campoli Presti, Paris March 21—April 11, 2015 by Sabrina Tarasoff
The 23,000-square-foot location that up until the late ’90s held the Guggenheim Museum’s gift shop in New York City’s Soho district could now be best described as an exhibition hall-cum-retail space-cum Mecca (at least for those who hold Miuccia Prada as God). Taken over by Prada as its flagship store in 2001, with none other than Rem Koolhaas leading its redesign, the space stretches through a full New York block, not so much as a corridor, but a wormhole to the future: with cylindrical glass elevators, dressing room walls that turn opaque at a simple touch, and a wave-shaped double staircase in zebrawood that extends the full length of the interior only to serve as a spot for trying on clog-heeled sandals and the like. It is – or was – contemporaneity itself, expressed in conspicuous architectural moves, with, as the late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp once suggested, “space as its ultimate luxury; space, and the dedication of so little room to stuff you can buy.” While it would be speculative at best to assume that Eileen Quinlan paid any particular attention to the Prada flagship ordeal in her recent exhibition at Campoli Presti, it seems to stand as a viable example of the strategies of presentation that are disseminated in her work. The redefinition of Prada’s retail identity through pervasive winks to museum-like presentation, particularly considering the scarcity of products actually on display, puts into equal question the intertwinement of art and commerce – or rather, the subsumption of artistic practices into commercial environments. Quinlan’s exhibition, Double Charlie, inverts this hierarchy, as the economic propensity of a photograph – and its infinite reproducibility – is aired out. In a poignant art-world faux pas (but a faux pas nonetheless), Double Charlie consists of 12 chromogenic prints, or, more specifically, two almost identical images installed in full editions of six (all 2015). Acknowledging this multiciplicity within the exhibition space asserts a very welcome attempt to remove some of the hush that surrounds the commercial aspects of artistic production. It’s a necessary breach of etiquette aimed at destabilizing the everpresent (mis)conception that art and commerce exist in separate realms. Quinlan’s photographs force an engagement with both sides: on the one hand, demystifying the art object from its mythic singularity by displaying full editions, and on the other, acquiescing to collector protocol by titling and presenting them as installation.
Predecessors
To engage in this strategy plainly would appear downright cynical, were it not for the artist’s rigidly intuitive process. The images themselves are mystical abstractions of something akin to leather bathed in a theatrically amber light. A soft and supple Prada bag, perhaps, staged as a still-life in an elusively ambiguous frame, waiting for the supposition of an opaque market slogan and a ritualized brand name to provide it with value. Of course, to give away too much would be vulgar or promiscuous; to give too little or too grudgingly, ineffective. Instead, Quinlan relies on a process based partly on rigidly self-imposed rules, and partly on strategic reflections on commercial photography. Though a full object is never displayed, it is hinted at through textures and curves, rendering it a ghost of its former self. Though she has previously discussed the partial lack of meaning in her titles—using the names of obscure perfumes in order to alter a viewer’s perception of the work, without any real significance to the product per se – it is hard to consider these images without conjuring a parallel to the lingering powers of scents. Charlie, for example, was a successful perfume manufactured by Revlon, marketed in the mid-’80s with the confident, Annie Hall-esque Shelley Hack as its spokeswoman. Though there are surely ways of linking the perfume’s factual history to an ancillary discussion on marketing strategies, Quinlan’s use of Charlie as a title seems to be more about an emotive extraction. With the tensions of the Charlie Hebdo attacks still fresh in the spring air, the title is naturally evocative to a Parisian audience. The title infuses the work with a subsidiary meaning, in order to sway the viewer in a preferred direction through memory and emotion. It is a marketing strategy in itself, veiling the essence of the “product” in misleading and affective slogans – not unlike a darker version of Prada’s Candy: “with joie de vivre as a starting point for new ideas!” If this was Quinlan’s intent with other similarly entitled series, such as After Hours (currently on view at Campoli’s London space), Double Charlie, then, does
not seem to be a disingenuous or tactical move. Rather, there is something touching about faintly dedicating the exhibition to the events of January past. Without delving into too much detail, it professes an ability to be vulnerable and real in spite of one’s artistic regime or outside expectations of emotionally void and impersonal practices. Quinlan extends herself and her own sentiments into the space and in return, the work gains the viewer’s trust. Perhaps this navigation between disingenuity and sincerity in the art world and its mechanics is at the core of Quinlan’s explorations into studio photography. Prada may have Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron, the Dan Flavin-church-cum-grotto in suburban Milan, and both an artistic and philosophical history to legitimize its practices, yet it makes no pretense to exist outside of the market that sustains it – regardless of its impact. Art, on the other hand, operates largely under the illusory forcing of a market that has sought to maintain total opacity. At best, the systems of editioning and dissemination that have been devised – particularly for photography – are arbitrary, and purely intended to increase value through scarcity and elusiveness. In Double Charlie, Quinlan opens up a discourse in favour of transparency. She untangles art and commerce only to navigate the boundaries therein, and locate where photography, as a medium as well as an object, fits within the contemporary – and its markets. It is a realistic and inquisitive approach with room for hesitation, interjection and intuition. In the end, the “double” in Double Charlie could refer to any number of things: the double edition, the double standards of the art world, or the illusion of specificity that doubles the value of objects. Whatever one’s take, the exhibition raises crucial questions regarding the interplay of value, display and objects in an age of luxury, while forgetting to acknowledge the complicated role of the photographic medium itself.
the overlay and synthesis of mass telecommunication and mass computation. Like a negative space that surrounds our modern-day communication and calculation technologies, telecomputation is the conceptual space that has conditioned and made possible the existence of the Internet and networked computers.
Sabrina Tarasoff is a curator and writer based in Paris.
Eileen Quinlan, Double Charlie, 2015, 12 Chromogenic prints mounted on sintra 101.6 x 76.2 cm each image courtesy of the artist and campoli
presti, london /paris
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Summer 2015
Dominique Pétrin / Three Withdrawal Movements for an ATM
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JUNE 11, 2015 JULY 19, 2015 at C2 / SUITE 104 - 800 MACLEOD TRAIL SE
contemporarycalgary.com
Pimping Up, 2015, silkscreened paper installation, 18’ x 30.5’ x 9.5’, ODD Gallery, Dawson, Yukon. Courtesy of the artist. CMagazineFinal.pdf
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Book Reviews
How to Train Your Virgin by Wednesday Black Badlands Unlimited, 2015 We Love Lucy by Lilith Wes Badlands Unlimited, 2015 God, I Don't Even Know Your Name by Andrea McGinty Badlands Unlimited, 2015
Review by Tess Edmonson In the spring, Badlands Unlimited, a publishing house founded by artist Paul Chan in 2010, released three new titles of erotic fiction in print and as e-books as part of a new series titled New Lovers. All volumes are written by previously unpublished authors and average about 120 pages. The first in the series, How To Train Your Virgin, by the pseudonymous Wednesday Black, takes place in a fictional landscape separated from our own by human dream space. Its queen is the book’s narrator. There, physical laws depart from our own (the populace is immortal, and we see the bodies of its members slip mercurially between chosen and natural forms) but the organic elements that make up the book’s visual register are nonetheless recognizable: dogs, birds, eggs, trees, flowers, fields. There is a vine girl (“a willow tree made female flesh”) and a vine man (“a hoary chap with face almost entirely occluded by the vines that grow from his skin. His body is shaggy with tendrils and leaves, and at the base, the thick genitals are petrified erect”); a “Baby Garden” where trees bear “orbs made up of curled fetuses of all species—fairies and nixies and gnomes, winged piglets, bearded unicorns, toothpick-haired unicorns”; a ghost woman with a leopard’s head and an “athlete’s body” that’s “Amazonian in its hardness”; and a centaur, whose species is described as “loyal creatures, being made of the stallion’s lust and the man’s intelligence and deliberation.” And there are others. As you can imagine, these bodies are all introduced in order for them to have sex with each other. And remarkably, despite their radical structural deviation from hu-
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man bodies, they somehow fall under the very human hegemony of penis-in-vagina, mutually orgasmic sex. The novel’s plot is motivated by the narrator queen’s desire to sabotage an affair her husband, the king, is on course to pursue. The targets of his affection are two human virgins – one male, one female – and the queen tries desperately to reach them before he can, in order to take their respective virginities and, in turn, nullify their appeal. Normally, she can reach the humans during their dreamtime, though with M – the girl – her attempts are “stymied by tinctures for depression, anxiety, suffering,” which prevent uninvited nighttime visitors. Peter – the boy – “does not take pills of forgetfulness” but rather dreams nightly of his memories of an unplaced war zone where “rockets crash, women shriek under the rapine attention of beings of clotted ash and fury,” and this trauma keeps the queen at bay. However, she manages to reach the virgins when they are vulnerable – Peter when he is sick, M when under the influence of mdma. The prose is peppered with structural and lexical anachronisms in the vein of “I run from the Hall and through the moors to the borderlands where the Realm gives way to a sandy, bemisted void.” It has the same effect as listening to characters in fantasy movies and television shows set in ancient or alternative worlds who uniformly have British accents and a formal syntax: that someone is awkwardly trying to affect aristocratic class or status through their proximity to history and archaic usage. It seems that even in fantasy, there’s a limit to what can be imagined.
Lilith Wes’ We Love Lucy is a bit more straightforward in its ambitions. On the night of her 30th birthday, a young woman plans to have dinner and then go to a club with her best friend Nicholas, a gay man with whom she shares an emotional connection so strong that she describes their meeting as “falling in love,” and his partner, James, who she assumes, by grace of his relationship to Nicholas, is gay. Instead they end up in a threesome, and the rest of the book is mostly dedicated to descriptions of them fucking in different permutations: first Nicholas and James while Lucy watches; then all three together; then James and Lucy; and lastly, all three again. The book ends – spoiler alert –in double penetration. “My heart ached,” Lucy narrates. “I’d never felt so full.” James, Lucy discovers, is bisexual – a perfect bridge between her and Nicholas’ previously incompatible sexual desires. For Lucy it’s the fantasy mmf relationship she never knew she wanted: she’s able to act on the romantic dynamic of her mutually supportive partnership with her gay best friend, while being attracted to the alphamale confidence – including some mild domination – of James, an experienced lover of women. This book is the most conventional of the three. Typical to a lot of mainstream female-narrated romance and erotica, it contains, early on, a kind of tepid description of the protagonist’s body, by which readers are meant to understand that she’s hot even if she doesn’t see herself that way: “I checked my phone for the time. They should be here soon, I thought, heading to the bathroom for one last check on the hair. It was behaving; long
Summer 2015
and loose like I normally wear it, the soft brown end resting between my shoulder blades. The sheer black fitted blouse hugged my small breasts and tapered down over the ample hips that are my birthright.” Just as the difference between the first and second books in the series was the second’s increased resemblance to actual lived sexual experience, the third book – even just the fact of it taking place in the art world and that its characters have realistically poor communications skills – is likely more identifiable for Badlands’ readership. In Andrea McGinty’s God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name, a female protagonist, Eve, an American artist freshly out of rehab, tours Europe in search of respite from professional and social pressures, time to devote to her studio practice, and dick. To find the latter, she uses Bangly, a smartphone app. While one might hope that Bangly could set into motion some previously unimagined potential for sexual-social media, it’s clearly just a fictional off-brand Tinder, facilitating sexts and hookups between globally triangulated, networked adults: “She was in thigh-high stockings, running down the streets of Vienna. She had a hookup app and a growing sense of self worth.” There’s vaguely an overarching narrative but it’s mostly organized around a series of sexual conquests: we see Eve sleep with a Finnish curator in London; fly to Finland to participate in a remote artist’s residency outside of Espoo; travel to Helsinki to hook up with someone she met on Bangly; return to the residency to sleep with its director; take a teaching position in Munich; simultaneously fuck both a new Bangly stranger and the curator of a prominent Austrian Kunsthalle in one of its bathroom stalls; go to London with the intention of fucking the first Finnish curator only to ultimately reject him in a
Book Review
display of strength and self-knowledge; and then finally, have oral sex with someone she meets swimming in her London hotel’s rooftop pool while mumbling to herself the novel’s eponymous line. Between hookups, the art-world specific elements of the narrative are by turns funny, as in Eve’s stream-of-consciousness insertions in the texts – “Are illusions worth having if they make you feel okay in the world?/Would he ever try anal?/Is sex different in Europe?/Why are men who are so good at eating pussy so bad at making coffee?/What the hell is speculative realism anyway?” – and kind of boring. Her “lowest point” is a “debilitating depression that led to erratic and self-destructive acts, like snorting coke off her gallery dealer’s cock. It wasn’t even a special occasion. It was a Tuesday.” Though this is maybe not inaccurate to the experience of certain players in the art world, it’s just too lame of a stereotype to merit parroting. But stereotypes are endemic, and perhaps central, to mainstream erotica – sexual fantasy and a subject’s interiority do not make easy bedfellows when a text is meant to titillate rather than challenge, experiment or critique. And perhaps this is where the work of the New Lovers series gets confusing. Chan cites Olympia Press, a Parisian imprint established in 1953, as a model for Badlands. Olympia published erotic pulp fiction in order to support more radical literary endeavours, including, famously, works by Burroughs, Becket, and Nabokov. And in this model, New Lovers, I guess, is meant to be the pulp. If the books aren’t transgressive, it’s because they’re not supposed to be. If they read like a lot of self-published erotica on the Internet, it’s by design. Chan is quick to point out, too, that Badlands’ publishers are amateurs. In an interview with ArtNews, he says that “the
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nice thing about what we do is we have no idea what we’re doing” and “we thought we’d give it a go” and “we’re certainly not erotic-fiction editors” and “we don’t read erotic fiction, none of us did – I barely have time to read menus at this point.”1 Just as the New Lovers series sees these publishers producing works in a genre about which they know little, all three novels rely on elements of the unknown on which to focus their subjects’ desire – perhaps all sexual fantasy does to a certain extent. It’s most obvious in How To Train Your Virgin, where we witness sex between literal aliens; We Love Lucy incorporates a straight female fetishization of gay male sex; and God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name positions its protagonist as a sort of American sexual explorer on the Continent. While sex is necessarily a potent point from which to chart discrepancies between American and European cultures, one gets the impression that McGinty uses the word “Finnish” to mean either exotic or unknowable, or deploys it in constructions as maladroit as “He could no longer hold it back and erupted like a glorious Finnish geyser” … are there geysers in Finland? A quick Google search says no. 1 Dan Duray, "The Art of Cunning: Paul Chan on Erotica, Ancient Greek, and his New Work", in ArtNews (March 6, 2015). http://www.artnews. com/2015/03/06/paul-chan-on-erotica-ancientgreek-and-his-new-work/
Predecessors
cmagazine 126 Quickly go to Youtube or Vimeo or whatever video site you’re using now, type “drone footage” in a search bar and then filter by view count. Find the least viewed drone video. We are willing to wager the footage is amazing. Something about floating above the ground, seemingly free from constraints, occasionally hovering, just feels so amazingly new and beautiful and phenomenologically strange. The language of high-end cinema has now been somewhat democratized by hobbyists and technophiles with GoPros. Certainly these aesthetic joys have inherent risks. Although enjoyable, it is impossible to talk about drone footage without the ever-present spectre of voyeurism, surveillance and warfare.
3. Drone footage
Early experimental animation from Norman McLaren courtesy of the nfb. A Chairy Tale (1957) and The Neighbours (1952) are part of many Canadian children’s upbringing and inspire oh-so-many warm nostalgic feelings. The shorts are stranger than we remembered – especially the soundscapes. Modifying a technique from a few decades earlier, McLaren actually drew electronic music with ink, drawing/painting/ etching directly onto the soundtrack area of the film. We especially recommend Begone Dull Care, an explosive abstraction with music by Oscar Peterson. Michel Lemieux claims that in striving for a unique scratched texture, McLaren taped the film to the ground and encouraged people to walk on it. Also, you have to love the multilingual credits.
1. Causa sui
This runs the spectrum from the already overpublicized “dazzle ships” or “razzle dazzle” to papier-mâché dead-horse sniper blinds. A favourite is a World War II English unit nicknamed “The Magic Gang.” This was a group composed of architects, engineers, art restorers, chemists, painters, and stage builders supposedly lead by third-generation master illusionist Jasper Maskelyne. Over the course of the war, they employed misdirection techniques and painted canvas and plywood to make jeeps look like tanks and to make tanks look like trucks. They created illusions of whole armies, huge battleships, fake bomb damage and disguised whole factories as suburbs. There are many people who claim that Jasper was a great exaggerator, but they don’t often deny the stories. The few archival pictures that are Internet searchable are amazing.
2. Norman McLaren
Causa sui was a recent Wikipedia hole we collectively fell into... Ctrl-C’d from Wikipedia, causa sui “denotes something which is generated within itself” and translates to “cause of itself” from Latin. Trying to grasp these ideas got us into some murky philosophical waters, but also cool sci-fi wherein a sex-changing time traveller discovers that they are both their own father and mother. There are implications, we think, for the making of things in the studio and the spooky undertones that objects – those tricky jerks – may contain their own cause and are just bending artists like us to their will. How wonderfully hyperbolic to think that the objects we create caused themselves.
6. Camouflage illusions
We really enjoy the process of going deeper, so the existence of Darknets of course amuses us. For those unaware, Darknets are hidden networks that run parallel to the public Internet we all know and love – Google knows the details. A project that explores some of the sticky implications of these networks and their sometimes illicit content is Random Darknet Shopper by !Mediengruppe Bitnik. The exhibition consisted of a laptop programmed to randomly purchase goods from a Darknet marketplace, and have them delivered to the gallery. Fumbling in the darkness, the bot chose some interesting items, including The Lord of the Rings box set, Moldavian cigarettes, a Hungarian passport, a baseball cap with a hidden camera and 120mg of mdma. Sounds like a weird party.
4. Random Darknet Shopper
70 Inventory by VSVSVS
5. Destructive tendencies
Or, an appreciation of the generative potential of ruination. A (big) bang can set so many things in motion; it’s a great conversation starter. People are very drawn to things becoming wreckage, us included. This has taken some fun tangents lately, from the wrestler Mick Foley to the Gutai group, who said in their manifesto: “Ruins unexpectedly welcome us with warmth and friendliness; they speak to us through their beautiful cracks and rubble – which might be a revenge of matter that has regained its innate life.” The fun part is figuring out what to do once it’s broken.
VSVSVS (pronounced versus versus versus), is a sevenperson collective and artist-run centre based out of a warehouse in the Portlands of Toronto. Formed in 2010, their activities encompass collective art making, a residency program, a formal exhibition space, and individual studio practices. Members include Stephen McLeod, Laura Simon, James Gardner, Miles Stemp, Wallis Cheung, Ryan Clayton and Anthony Cooper. Their collective work focuses on collaborative production through multiples, drawings, video works, sculpture, installations, and performance.
7. List of things that didn’t quite make the list
Agency
Giordano Bruno
Push-ups
Dust
Is putting hot food in the fridge safe?
Evolution of Body Hair
Squatting
Is it safe to swallow phlegm?
Winchester Mystery House
The Hern Generating Station
Ewan McGregor
Jimmy Hoffa
Jaywalking
Keanu Reeves
Non-Architecture
Free Falling
Silver
Wisdom Teeth
Centre Bang!
Pickled Food
Keys
Hot Sauce
Atari
Comedy
Death Grips
Park Fiction
Lady Allen of Hurtwood
Summer 2015
VSVSVS, Hug, 2015, c-print. image courtesy of the artists
Inventory
Predecessors
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Artefact
The World Will Always Welcome Lovers
High above the hordes of stupefied tourists that shuffle through the clouds of cannabis smoke on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, there is a vast and secret library. It is the home of over 7000 books reflecting decades of passionate scholarship and collecting by University of Amsterdam professors Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves. The couple’s private collection spreads across some 20 bookshelves, ranging from little glass cabinets to massive wall installations dominating their spacious, plant-filled apartment, hidden from the Red Light District’s culture of display. The library’s topics are as broad as they are specific: the Marquis de Sade and his legacy; sexual liberation movements; masturbation, male prostitution, and the intersection between sex and crime. There are a few books on werewolves. There is a shelf devoted to child sexuality and intergenerational love. They have first edition copies of the earliest German sexology books. A section on homosexuality in the Muslim world. Every issue of butt magazine. Hundreds of biographies of queer historical figures. My new artwork is an audio guide of this library, and I am looking for a clue. I need something to guide me through this forest’s worth of paper, some mode of portraying the attributes of this trove of published material. A book opens, revealing an ex libris bookplate on the inside cover. It was a gift from Mattias to celebrate the completion of Gert’s PhD in 1987. The illustrator Pam Georg Rueter was commissioned to carve a woodcut for the bookplate: an image of two naked youths, encircled by the utopian lyric, “The World Will Always Welcome Lovers.” The bookplate is not glued into every publication in the library. I come across it by chance, here and there. I find it in a book from 1964 called Greek Love; in a collection of essays by Esther Newton that includes “The Myth of the Mannish Lesbian”; in a 1908 sexology classic by Edward Carpenter entitled The Intermediate Sex, that warns:
by B enny Nemerofsky Ramsay attitude that homosexuals – or rather, “Uranians” — were humankind’s next evolutionary stage. The pamphlet carries a second label, revealing a former owner, Jacob Schorer, whose Amsterdam library of gay material was confiscated during the Nazi occupation of Holland, never again to be recovered. How did this book find its way into Hekma’s keeping? Now the bookplate appears in a copy of The Young and the Evil, a story from 1933 written by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Gert pulled it out for me from a bookshelf in the bedroom. I hadn’t found it myself because the Ds, Es and Fs on the gay fiction shelves are arranged in a second row hidden behind the As, Bs and Cs. I had never heard of Ford, but was enchanted by an interview I found in Gay Sunshine Interviews Vol. 1. Ford chats casually about his enviable Paris set, about meeting surrealist René Crevel at Gertude Stein’s home; about Edith Sitwell introducing him to the great love of his life, painter Pavel Tchelitchew; about Hemingway’s homophobia and big feet. He conjures an image of Djuna Barnes in a Tangiers of yesteryear:
Submit, drink from his hand that boy so generous with his slenderness a gazelle, as if Allah had dressed him in mother-of-pearl fawn-hide
Opening another book, a typed letter addressed to Hekma falls out, written by Leyland himself. He is searching for an apartment in Amsterdam. He is working on a Dutch translation of Verlaine. He signs off yours in affectionate comradeship in gay liberation, Winston. It is not the only personal letter folded inside book pages that I find. There is one written to Duyves by the late Dutch composer Peter Schad, expressing his enthusiastic distaste for a certain gay composer’s first symphony. Could I design a narrative around the books in the library that bear Hekma’s ex libris bookplate? Or perhaps Leyland’s touch could act as a cue; he could play a leading role as I navigate this vast cast of interconnected characters. A hunt for books with personal letters inside? Each approach is as appealing as it is arbitrary. She had finished Nightwood and I was Whatever methodology emerges, I know typing it for her. I found a home in the my portrait of the library must be unoffiCasbah, and Djuna came down from Paris cial in nature. There has to be something and lived with me there and our daily rouillicit about my approach, something oblitine was that I would go to the beach in the que and bibliomantic. Something queer. morning, come back and have lunch, type in I don’t want to browse through Duyves the afternoon. I don’t know if I finished the and Hekma’s collection like a dilettante, book before she went back to Paris or not. tumbling with the distracted drift of an Internet surfer. But for now, flânerie seems Gay Sunshine Interviews Vol. 1 is kept in the only sensible approach of wading my a cabinet of books above the toilet, a sec- way into the library, so I surrender to the tion devoted to anthologies, including one labyrinth, looking for hints, sniffing spines called Orgasms of Light, where I find a poem for the perfume of writing that comes out by Ford. A line stands out: to attract no one. Writing comes out like a perfume to attract no one there is no one to attract
Both anthologies are published by Winston Leyland, whose name surfaces repeatedly throughout the library. His influence is extensive and diverse: he is the publisher of a book about consensuality in So commonplace is it to misunderstand, sadomasochism called The Kiss of the Whip; so easy to misrepresent. he is the editor of a book of gay Latin The bookplate is inside Nat iedereen be- American fiction entitled My Deep Dark hoort te weten omtrent Uranisme, a slim turn- Pain Is Love; he is thanked in the transof-the-century volume about the nascent lator’s note of a collection of homoerotic
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poetry by the 8th-century Persian poet Abū Nuwās.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is an artist and diarist. His work in video, sound, and text contemplates the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices – sung, spoken or screamed. He has created sound pieces for the audio guide systems of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Hekma and Duyves’ private library is the subject of his current audio guide project.
Summer 2015
Ex libris by illustrator Pam Georg Rueter, displayed in the library of Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves, Amsterdam, 2015. photo: benny nemerofsky ramsay
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