Plastic Shit

Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit . . .

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984

On the face of it, Milan Kundera’s declaration that kitsch is the denial of shit appears wrong. Kitsch, after all, IS shit. It’s all that cloying, mewling, cutesie crap found in gift shops and tourist strolls, all those visual gags of dogs playing cards and mechanical singing fish for sale at the hardware store, and those maudlin Elvis busts and Diana icons and acres of knick-knacks on the shelves at Value Village. For Kundera, what makes all that stuff kitsch, and not art (or at least not art with a capital “A”) is that it is missing a vital organic element. Kitsch, for Kundera, is art removed of life’s messy bits: pain and suffering, hunger and sorrow, decay and waste. Kundera’s kitsch is a sanitized art of Pollyannaish desire that wants nothing to do with the more disturbing parts of our existence. It just wants to be liked. Excessively needy and too willing to please, its lack of shit overwhelms it, and it becomes what it lacks. Kitsch becomes shit.

In recent years, Toronto-based artist Katharine Harvey has been creating sculptural installations using plastic packaging and cheap dollar-store items – materials and merchandise that are intended only for a single or limited use or for the stimulation of momentary sentiment – things which, having passed only briefly through the stage of utility, are destined to quickly become refuse, stuff we tend to call shit. Harvey’s fascination with this material came from her experience as a painter trying to capture the fleeting reflections and refractions of water. Her investigations into water’s infinitely variegated visual qualities led her to a remarkably similar phenomenon found in the reflections of store windows. She was drawn to those curious, older, family-operated stores whose windows display an accumulation of dusty unsold gift items and bric-a-brac. Viewed from different angles, the windows featured a parade of curios suspended between the reflections of the activity on the street and glimpses into the store’s interior. Flattened first through the working photograph and secondly through painting and glazing, Harvey’s Storefront paintings became liquid spaces in which inside and outside flowed into each other, punctuated by a dream-world of floating Venetian gondolas, ballerinas on point, elaborate clocks and fancy vases.

Harvey’s Storefront paintings were elaborations on water as a metaphor of the subconscious – a diorama of submerged desires and stunted fantasies. They were also the basis for installations that used existing art gallery vitrines to assemble fantastic versions of the vernacular (Seasick , YYZ Artists Outlet, 2003; Storefront, Stride Gallery window, Calgary, 2001; To the Depths, Parts I & II, Solo Exhibition, Toronto, 2001-02). In these installations, Harvey organized dense collections of giftware and costume jewellery by tone and hue, and in the process created a series of impressionistic tableaux that deflected attention from the individual objects. The collections of spectrally shifting coloured objects seemed to strike a familiar but minor chord, evoking those dyspeptic feelings of detachment and alienation we often experience during the Christmas season in face of a sea of pointless merchandise and hollow commercial sentiment.

During 2006 and 2007, Harvey’s media migrated from glass and ceramic giftware to plastic packaging and mass produced dollar store items. She continued her colouristic approach to assemblage, prismatically organizing the recyclable blister packing and muffin containers as a clear spray at the top of Waterfall, (Rodman Hall, 2006-07) down to the deep pools of translucent greens and deep blues of the plastic waste baskets, water bottles, dish racks and other seemingly limitless blue-green coloured plastic dollar store ephemera. In the installations Fountain (Making Room, 2006), and in the Waterfall, (Service Canada, Harbourfront, 2007), Harvey left behind her dollar-store merchandise to create impressionistic assemblages made entirely of transparent packing material – works of pure plastic froth.

Harvey's work is notable for the parallel investigations she pursued into both the optical and metaphorical qualities of her subjects and her chosen media. Her open process of free association allowed her to move from a study of the optical effects of water, to water as a metaphorical container of submerged consciousness, from an investigation into the attractions of kitsch back to the optical possibilities of colour-classified junk, and from the foamy optical character of a dense mass of polyethylene packing, back to the existential reality of a mountain of plastic shit.

One would be hard pressed to find two things materially more opposite than plastic and shit. Plastic is organically inert – a product of the petrochemical industry. Shit is fetidly natural, organic and very personal. Shit belongs to each of us individually. Plastic comes from somewhere else. Plastics are associated with cheapness and disposability. They can be easily moulded and mass-produced. They can be made flexible, elastic and paper thin or rigid and sturdy in proportion to their lightweight. Plastic can be transparent or opaque and is highly prized as an impermeable moisture barrier. All this make plastics cheaper and more adaptable than either wood, leather, cloth, ceramic, glass or metal would be used for similar purposes.

We know, however, that plastics are not as durable as organic materials and we know damn well that plastics do not decompose. Moving plastic parts break and wear out all the time and many plastic objects are just a waste – designed for limited or single usages, rendering their active life cycle shorter than that of many insects. And the passive life cycle – life after disposal – is immeasurable. While many plastics can be vaporized with intense heat, most often they avoid decomposition and continue to exist somewhere in the world: in a landfill, at the bottom of a lake or ocean, or ground up and melted down to be made into more plastic. Plastic is two times shit: first because it so often fails us and second because we are continuously in the process of disposing it.

By representing and including kitsch, plastic merchandise and disposable plastic packaging in her work, Katharine Harvey ensures that romantic sparkle and liquid shimmer is not merely a vehicle of escape, but a memento mori of our embodied subjectivity. That is the existential reality that Harvey’s work probes. As we find ourselves drowning in our own refuse, we are forced to examine our habits of consumption and production. In any dollar store, Wal Mart, Zellers, Canadian Tire or Best Buy we can see our own infantile and narcissistic desires reflected in row upon row of cheap merchandise and the mountain of plastic garbage that they generate. This stuff will never die. We will.

Gordon Hatt, 2008

Daisuke Takeya: Kara

Daisuke Takeya, Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"

When Daisuke Takeya asked me if I would talk about his work on the occasion of his exhibition at the Japan Foundation here in Toronto, I was a little unsure of where I would begin. Takeya is an artist whose work ranges from figurative, portrait and landscape painting to video, installation and conceptual practice. His work is informed by personal experience, social criticism and by his professional training in figurative art – concerns and considerations which at times are articulated in specific bodies of work and at other times can be seen to form threads that connect and reappear at various places in his art.

It is impossible within the limited framework of this talk to adequately address all of the threads and media which encompass the artist’s practice, and I won’t attempt to do it here. Instead, I would like to apply conventional art historical method to a close analysis of some of Takeya’s paintings over the last 15 years. This examination will deal with how the artist’s concerns as a young man were given form within the idiom of his academic figurative art training in the early 1990s. I will trace the artist’s evolving engagement with the figure and the landscape as signifiers of feeling and desire to arrive at the current body of work.

* * *

“Kara” in Japanese means “empty.” Its Kanji character also represents the word for sky, air, and space (“Sora”). Both “Kara,” and “Sora” hover above Toronto and Tokyo, as well as Ottawa, Osaka and the village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland. It is one thing that all these places have in common. The “emptiness” or the “sky” of the Kara series of paintings can be seen to have its origins as far back as some of the artist’s early student work, where the inclusion of horizons into the backgrounds of figure studies and later as pendants to figure studies come to represent both a rhetorical and literal “emptiness.” 

In the mid 1990s, Takeya was a student at the New York Academy of Art, an art school dedicated exclusively to the study of the human figure in painting, sculpture and drawing. The study of the human figure has its roots in classical Greek art and in its Roman imitators, where the gods and goddesses of Olympus were rendered as beautiful and heroic humans wearing little or no clothing. The revival of interest in classical mythology and art during the Italian Renaissance stimulated a return to illustrating mythologies and histories with the naked figure and learning the skill required to render the nude convincingly became one of the pillars of the academic teaching of art.

The study of the human figure meant originally learning anatomy from skeletons and cadavers. In the modern era photographs are an important source for visual information about the body. But most often the study of the human figure is accomplished through that staple of art school – the life drawing class. In life drawing class, a model disrobes and strikes a pose for a predetermined length of time. The model usually stands, sits or reclines on a low riser, surrounded by students at easels or with drawing pads. Depending on the point of the class, the model may start out with quick gestural poses, and then settle into one or two extended poses. To render a “finished” figure composition convincingly from life (e.g. without recourse to photography) the model must remain in the same pose for hours or in sittings that extend over days. The pose must be something that can be held reasonably still – no extended and raised limbs, or difficult and uncomfortable positions that cause the model to move and adjust position frequently. The job of modelling is not for fidgety people. If a person is capable of relaxing into a state of torpor, they will probably make a good model and the artist will not have to constantly readjust the perspective and recast shadows. The good model is a paragon of inactivity. The good model does nothing. Just stands, sits or lies there. 

Initially, working from the model is a transgressive experience. After all, how often do we sit in a room with a naked stranger? But the unsettling nature of this situation soon gives way to the various and complex challenges of rendering accurately the perspective and proportion of the human anatomy. Combined with the study of proportion, the repetition of the practice of drawing from the model in poses of extended duration produces artists who are adept at a naturalistic representation of the human body. 

The reality of this practice of learning to draw from the figure, however, has had the inevitable effect of characterizing what we know of as figurative art. It gives us a disproportionately large number of images of a relatively narrow range of human activity and attitudes. Typically subjects recline or sit, are apparently thoughtful or vacant, sexually available or enervated and despairing because, that is what life models do best. Figurative painting can provide us with models of action, but these images are heavily dependent on photography and always betray the conventions of the lens. Painting and drawing from the figure then rely on a stationary and relaxed model and, as a convention, it tends to idealizes passivity, isolation and vulnerability.

Looking at Takeya’s early figurative work, one can see that the landscapes and environments in which he has placed his figures underscore the apparent enervation and lassitude of his models. Paintings such as Abandon, 1993, oil on linen, 81.5 x 43"; and Dead-End Street, 1994, oil on linen, 80 x 55" feature the juxtaposition of the naked figure with vacant, despoiled and dark cityscapes. These paintings don’t create believable spaces as much as they describe to us symbolic and psychological states of mind. In Abandon, the reclining figure’s legs are supported by what looks to be a pile of junk. Further examination closer to the bottom of the canvas reveals random objects that one might find in an artist’s studio, piled high, occupying almost 90% of the canvas. Above and beyond the pile of junk, is a city scape – the silhouettes of a few tall buildings against a light sky, and above that a dark low-lying cloud. In Dead End Street, a model standing in the classic contraposto position with head bowed is surrounded by road and highway barriers, a dust pan, a fire extinguisher, and a welding mask among other objects. A yellow line passes below the triangular police barrier, directing our line of vision to a horizon which is marked by a checkered yellow “Dead End” sign. The dark low- hanging cloud and the pile of junk, the “Dead End” sign, and the various street barriers, all work to signify a mood of pessimism and despair, a mood which already seems to be illustrated by the demeanor of the model.

In this early work, one is able to identify a youthful alienation expressed in the language of figurative and landscape painting – enervated figures and the bleak cityscapes are symbolic rendering of the artist’s own feelings. Takeya characterized his mood at this time as being “happy to be sad.” On the threshold of adulthood, his experience of life was coloured by a pessimism born of a personal loss and an isolation that was accentuated by the experience of studying in a foreign country, in a language and in a culture that he was just beginning to understand.

A series of diptychs produced by the artist in the late 90s ( Untitled, 1999, charcoal on paper, 56 x 40.5"; Pornography,1999, oil on linen, 64 x 88"; Waveless Ocean, 1999, oil on wood, panel, 32 x 47"; Eternal Flame, 1999, oil on wood panel, 32 x 47"), contrasts, in the right hand panel, figures in various states of repose to, in the left panel, city, sea or landscapes familiar to the artist which are comprised of 80 to 95% sky. The right-hand panels, many of which were based on life modelling sessions, are, like Abandon and Dead-End Street, rendered again in moody, dark environments that create a general feeling of languor, aimlessness or despair. Like the earlier student paintings, each figure is cloaked in shadows and revealed only by the raking light of a single source – a light bulb, a television sometimes, but most often from what appears to be a window. One can imagine that the left-hand panel may be the view outside that space, through the window perhaps, or again, psychologically speaking, a symbolization of the figure’s emotional landscape. Takeya has told me that the landscape images are of of Japanese places. Todaiji Temple in Untitled, Yokohama City in Eternal Flame,Yokosuka City in Pornography. After the gloomy cityscapes which complete the backgrounds of the earlier paintings, the big skies of the diptychs may seem bright and airy by comparison. But on further examination these big skies are overcast, or dusky or just bleakly empty. Perhaps the dark foreboding and pessimism of the earlier work has cleared up some, and become something a more manageable nostalgia, a little less heavy, and maybe the beginning of something new.

In the series of diptychs Everybody Loves You, done while he was still living in New York, Takeya continues the contrast between a big-skied landscape on the left and a figurative representation on the right. By this time, however, the figure studies have become somewhat uniform head and shoulder portraits lit by a single low frontal light. Recalling his earlier work where the figures were cloaked in shadow, the position of the light in the Everybody Loves You portraits illuminates the tip of the nose, cheekbones, and the brow, and casts heavy shadows on the rest of the head, including the bridge of the nose and the sides and top of the head. The effect, which is similar to holding a flashlight to your chin while standing in the dark, can be quite theatrical. It exaggerates contours, focuses attention on the eyes, diminishes the hair and surface quality of the skin, and in doing so de-emphasizes gender. The effect has been used in the cinema to allude to demonic possession or to an evil alter ego that may emerge after dark. But it is also associated with a type of campfire intimacy – the shared experience of being in the dark with others and the bonding in the face of uncertainty which that brings.

In other words, Takeya’s choice of lighting may be ideal for the complex topic of speaking of love, de-emphasizing gender and bringing into relief our conflicted identities and often awkward relations with friends, acquaintances and the objects of our affections. Moreover, the expression of affection, which is possibly more freely given in the United States than in Japan or even among the famously reticent Canadians, is none-the-less, universally problematic, and no amount of world travelling relieves the individual from this personal accounting: Do you or don’t you (love me), do you mean what you say (when you say “I love you”) and do you say what you feel (when you say “I love you”). 

Perhaps this ambivalence is emphasized by the left-hand panel cityscapes of the New York skyline as seen from Brooklyn. Few other skylines are as recognizable as the New York City skyline, and yet, as Takeya renders it under towering skies, he makes it seem quite ordinary, diminished in comparison to the infinite sky above, suggesting perhaps that like the famous skyline, the words “I love you,” may be just another banal social construction in the grand scheme of things. In Everybody Loves You the moodiness of the early figurative paintings and diptychs has been stripped down into a complex ambivalence. The anonymous and quiescent nudes have morphed into individuals with names – seemingly self-aware and capable of action, but perhaps also with self-identities and beliefs as insubstantial and as unformed as the sky above.

From being “happy to be sad” in the years immediately following his arrival in North America, Takeya adapted emotionally and philosophically to his new home. In his painting he pared down the conventionalized figurative representations of sadness and despair into existential mug-shot like portraits and flat, almost featureless landscapes expressing neither happiness or sadness, but a heavy, pervasive spiritual emptiness. 

The Kara series of paintings retains and enlarges the city scape with the big sky and altogether dispenses with its figurative pendant. No longer are we asked to consider the symbolic despair of the slouched model, or the identity of the flashlight-illuminated individuals. No longer does the landscape act as an exclamation mark for these figures. Depicting the skies over a number of cities and towns in Japan and Canada, each of the canvases of the Kara series measures 6 feet in height. The cityscapes in each painting occupy less than 2 per cent of the paintings’ vertical height – a proportion of sky to land even more dramatic than in the earlier work. If you watch the reactions of viewers, the natural inclination is to approach each painting in a slight crouch, in an attempt to identify the depicted city scape. Once a landmark is identified and thus the city too, the spectator feels able to stand up straight and back up from the painting to take it in whole. 

In the Kara series, questions of identity have shifted from individuals to cities and towns, but perhaps, like the head and shoulder’s portraits of Everybody Loves You which, after a time begin to seem less and less dissimilar, so too seem the cities of Osaka, Tokyo, Toronto and Ottawa when juxtaposed to the vastness of the sky above. The radical perspective of Takeya’s view of the cities which he visited and lived in, reminds one of looking at the earth from space, where countries and ethnicities and borders are invisible. When asked about the feelings behind these images, the artist responded, “I wanted to feel like air.”

The Kara series was originally painted in 2001 and 2002. Those paintings were tragically destroyed, and the current series of paintings is a recreation of the original, five years later. The discipline required to re-paint the entire series is a testament to the personal significance the works held for the artist. When asked about the inevitable difference between the paintings of five years ago and the contemporary recreations, the artist responded by saying that the current series is more colourful. This is not hard to imagine when we look at the tonality of the city scape panels of the preceding Everybody Loves You series. In Kara, the sequel, Takeya’s work has opened up. The skies begin to be less leaden and airier. A general greyness has given way to a luminous spectral range of colour ranging from sky blue to indigo, to pink and to orange. Emptiness, or Kara, at one time a burden for the Daisuke Takeya, has become a space of possibility.

Ed Pien: A Soft and Gentle Darkness

In a Realm of Others is a multimedia installation of drawing, video and slide projections. The centrepiece of the installation is a long passageway connected to a series of three circular chambers made from translucent glassine paper. Enveloping the structure is a continuous green curtain of glassine, covered with hand-painted treetops. At one end is a narrow opening leading to a passage whose curtain walls gently billow around you as you advance. At the end of the passage are the inner chambers – round curtain walls of white glassine rising to the ceiling. These walls are animated by graphic images of twisted and disfigured ghouls and demons – horrible, nightmarish figures surrounding and hovering threateningly above images of vulnerable and frightened children.

Located in the innermost structure of the installation is a video monitor showing a succession of children attempting to make scary faces and threatening noises. The video of children exploring their ideas of monsters is paralleled by a second video, outside the glassine structure, of adults recounting their personal ghost stories. The children in the video puff themselves up to become what they imagine to be frightening and monstrous. They’re cute in their play acting, and it seems they needed little prompting to mug and growl for the camera.

Being inside the enveloping structure of In a Realm of Others is an extraordinary experience. The walls transmit a diffused coloured light, and they move as you move, like a sympathetic living organism. The ink drawings of monsters are unsettling and disturbing – ghostlike, when seen through a second layer of the translucent glassine. Passing out of the inner sanctum you notice overhead a violet-mirrored image of tree tops – a sort of moving Rorschach blot – projected on a hanging disk. It is dizzying, disorientating and exciting – an intriguing and complex punctuation to a remarkable journey. I feel sad that it is over, sad to be leaving this space.

* * *

“If I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.” How strange it is to remember these words today, words I at one time recited before every bedtime. Sleeping alone in the dark would seem to be frightening enough for any child without introducing the idea of sudden death. The prayer, I now realize, was a parent’s small plea for mercy, pitched from the tiny voice of a child. Walking through the installation I find myself thinking about childhood nighttime fears, bedtime stories and prayers. Here between these satiny sheets I am reminded of the painful anxieties and candied dreams of my childhood.

Fear of abandonment, I think, may be one of the most profound traumas of childhood. Looking back, I know that it was a critical aspect of my childhood psychological development. It is easy to see how this anxiety at an early age can have profound effect on the development of character. Most people can remember the childhood anxiety of being temporarily separated from a parent in a crowed place, or being the last child to be picked up at school. For a child, the possibility of abandonment is a reality of every waking moment – living in a world that is largely mysterious, and dependent on adults for every need, monsters and demons have the potential to lurk in every closet and under every bed. Abandonment, loneliness and isolation, of course, are only places where fear begins. It is the imagination of what happens next, which is the stuff of dreams, nightmares, fairy tales and art.

Some parents tell their children fairy tales before bedtime. Stories such as the Grimms’ fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Taiwanese fairy tale “Tiger Grand Aunt,” explore childhood night fears. Passage through a dark, malevolent forest is a common metaphor in these fables. Adults in these fables are ambiguous figures – alternatively protectors and predators, nurturing parents and savage beasts. Wolves and tigers impersonate grandmothers and grand aunts. Mothers, and surrogate mothers in particular, play important roles, as symbols of the anxiety of separation and abandonment. Fundamental to the stories is the young protagonist’s success at tricking the demon; killing it and managing to successfully escape its clutches. The endings are always more or less happy.

The fairy tales that were told to me as a child, or the prayers I recited at bedtime did little to either stimulate or allay my fears of the night. A bigger factor in my falling asleep was more likely the comfort provided by a seam of light filtering through a bedroom door left slightly ajar. That light was my link to the world of the living – to the gentle clink and clatter of dishes being washed, to muted adult voices and to the resonant hum of the television still on in the living room.

* * *

I’m on the outside now, standing in the soft green glow of the glassine. Scanning the monumental image of treetops, I can almost feel them swaying and groaning in the wind. Here outside, this luminous paper giant feels strange and threatening. I turn around and go back, to feel again the thrill of moving through the maternal folds of the passageway, of the walls of light that flow magically around me. I am drawn again to the hearth-like inner sanctum, which, in changing from green to white, this time seems hotter and angrier.

In A Realm of Others seems to be an inversion. Instead of the passage leading you into darkness, like the process of falling asleep, or walking into a dense forest, going from the outside to the innermost sanctum, you pass into light. But it is not a metaphorical enlightenment to which we are drawn, rather it is as if travelling to the molten core of the earth, to the white-hot source of passion, and anxiety, to the reptilian brain of this strange creature. These kids and their monster faces and noises only teach us that we are born of fear, and that at the centre of our personality is insecurity and doubt and the trauma of separation. And as we turn to leave that bright white place and distance ourselves from the primal scream, as we talk to our therapists and begin to take control of our inner child, it is not a light we step into, rather a soft and gentle darkness.

Gordon Hatt, 2005

Marla Hlady: Playing Piano

Being in a room with a piano is an immersive experience. When a piano is played, the large wooden body of the instrument resonates and everything in the room resonates with it. Sound is cast off in every direction, bouncing off the ceilings and the walls, enveloping and at times overwhelming you. Among musical instruments the piano has an unmatched dynamic range – sound grows in volume and diminishes, fills the surrounding space only to recede from it. In the hands of an experienced pianist the piano is a tool of domination and submission, of seduction and conquest.

To experience a player piano is to add a further level of complexity. Piano keys move and notes sound as if struck by invisible fingers. But the music issuing from the instrument isn’t light and ethereal, as one might imagine coming from some ghostly spirit playing a piano. Rather, the music is robust, dynamic and rhythmic – everything we associate with performed piano. Unlike the experience of listening to a conventional recording, one keenly perceives the trace of an absent musician.

A 19th century mechanical engineering project, the player piano was perfected in the early 20th century. The basic principle involves music which is “recorded” by making a series of perforations corresponding to musical notes on a roll of paper. The paper is scrolled mechanically across a pneumatic “tracker bar” and as the paper perforations run over the tracker bar air is allowed to pass through, triggering the operation of switching valves. These switches open larger valves which effect the piano action – the hammer striking the string. The later development of the "reproducing" player piano saw an elaboration of the system of valve switches to enable the instrument to perform the tempo, phrasing, dynamics and the pedalling of a performance.

Paper perforations on the music roll have been likened to an early form of binary code and indeed, all contemporary versions of the player piano replace the paper roll with a digital MIDI interface. The basic pneumatic system of the player piano anticipated its later application in robotics and machinery and like a primitive programmable robot the player piano mimics basic human functions – the piano roll its programmed brain, its compressor the heart and lungs, its tubing and valves a system of veins and musculature.

Player pianos were a significant presence in the popular culture at the same time that artists in other fields were becoming inspired by the machine. Futurists, Dadaists, Suprematists and Constructivists as well as avant-garde filmmakers, dramatists, choreographers and architects proclaimed their love of the machine and aspired to make their new art with the angular, hard edge and mechanical qualities of turn of the century industrial culture. It is not hard to imagine that the rhythmic and contrapuntal qualities of Ragtime and Dixieland were a response to the accelerated tempo and mechanization of life at this time and the rote mechanical reproduction of the basic player piano may have been particularly popular for its ability to perform this up-tempo and impressionistically mechanical sounding dance music.

At the turn of the century the player piano competed as a new recording and entertainment technology alongside the Victrola and the moving picture, but it now exists as a curious historical footnote at the margins of our consciousness. While recorded music and cinema grew to become the basis of the 20th century entertainment industry, the emergence of commercial radio in the 30s was the beginning of the end for the player piano.

* * *

“Playing Piano” is an open ended investigation into the mechanics of sound. It is an open journal describing the way the artist listens, looks, thinks and explores the material world. Marla Hlady takes apart machines and exposes their inner workings to rebuild them as versions of their former selves, building and rebuilding machines that make and record sounds. Taking a thing apart is a critique – a way of honouring the thing, a way of admiring its construction and the many decisions of its designers and makers. It exposes the assumptions and aspirations upon which the thing is made and it reveals the author’s inventions and limitations. Rebuilding the thing is a form of love and respect. Adding to a thing – decorating it, manipulating it, customizing it – is to enter into a dialogue, to talk to the thing and to engage its maker’s spirit, to speculate on its history, to revel in its possibility and to indulge in creative anarchy. Among artists, Marla is a “hot-rodder.” She adores machines by taking them apart, honours them when she rebuilds them, and engages them in a dialogue by adapting them, reinventing them and “playing” with them. She builds and rebuilds machines in ways that describe the way sound would look like if you could see it, touch it, walk around it.

“Playing Piano” begins with the thing itself. An upright reproducing player piano is at once full of social, cultural and private histories (witness the little nicks and dents in the body, the missing pieces of moulding) and yet curiously also something of a blank slate. Slightly compact in appearance it could be overlooked in a home (especially if you don’t know how to play the piano), a large piece of furniture concealing its musical potential and its mechanical sophistication. But where to begin?

For Marla, “playing piano” means to explore the instrument's sculptural and aural potential. Making reference to a history of music that employed “prepared pianos,” she set the terms of her engagement by deciding to explore the range of sounds she could get out of the piano with various mechanical adaptations. Getting started meant pulling out the keyboard, eliminating the temptation to engage the piano conventionally inside the thing. Once the keyboard was gone, it reverted from a musical instrument to a machine. She then stripped away the front panels to reveal the strings, valves and music roll mechanism above, the power source, valves and bellows below.

Marla then proceeded to “eviscerate” the piano, to gut it, by removing the electric motor and bellows compressor, the source that activates the valves and hammers. She pulled the motor and the compressor out of the piano and across the room, reconnecting it with lengths of rubber tubing. It is the air pressure in the system of tubing that determines the median tempo of the piano and by stretching, extending and reducing the air pressure in the system she began the process of slowing the tempo of the playback mechanism. Having exploded the air compression source, she turned her attention to the music roll assembly. She removed it too from the body of the piano and remounted it above, in the process extending the system of pneumatic tubing to reach the elevated the music roll and its air motor and adding further drag to the tempo. The once the familiar jazz melody on the found piano roll now plays so slowly as to be completely unrecognizable.

Pulling out the “guts” of the upright piano revealed its strings. In pianos hammers “strike” strings, but strings can be activated in other ways. She fabricated a strumming mechanism from a cannibalized photocopier then added two pie-plate press machines. She also added two whistle machines and microphones to the bellows and the air vents of the tracker bar. Each of these devices is initiated by vibration sensors attached to the piano's strings. When a string vibrates, it causes a sound event by one of the machines or activates one of the microphones. To make these sounding mechanisms audible she attached two surface resonating speakers to the piano soundboard, amplifying the discreet strumming and damping sounds though the native amplification system.

Marla’s removal of the keyboard and her extrusion of the piano’s heavy air compressor and music roll assemblies are physical aggressions; her affixing of a variety of light mechanical electronic devices to its sound board and strings are a series of gentle caresses. In her hands the player piano has begun to resemble a mechanical “one-man-band” with her electronic preparations creating a half dozen simultaneous sound events and actions. She has taken a magnifying glass to the instrument so that we can experience it – as a musical instrument but also as a fascinating piece of vintage mechanics. She has drawn and stretched the piano outside of its body to expose its internal system as a network of distances – a network of sources and pathways and destinations that circulate, escape and return within a closed but leaky system.

Gordon Hatt, 2007

Fool for Love

Love makes me treat you the way that I do,
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?
There's nothing in this world too good

For a girl so good and true.
Gee baby, ain't I good to you?

From the song, Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You? (Don Redman, Andy Razaf, 1929)

What role do visual fictions play in our consciousness? How do we respond to enacted images of happiness on billboards, sadness in television melodramas, or fear in horror movies? Do we rush to emotionally embrace each unfolding narrative, fooled every time as it were, empathizing with people who act out our daydreams and nightmares? Some suggest that we have a unique ability to temporarily suspend disbelief, to empathize with pictures as if the narratives they describe were real, and then to cleanly disengage as the credits roll and we turn the page. Can we maintain objective distance, and release only a fraction of our potential emotional response for fictions, reserving real empathy for real people and real events?1

The ability to discriminate between real and manufactured emotion is a talent individuals possess in varying measures. Yet our ability to negotiate the emotional power of fictional imagery may  be compromised by sheer volume. Everyday life is saturated by the proliferation of fantasy-based advertising imagery, coupled increasingly with an omnipresent popular culture of superheroes and supermodels that enact fantasies of prowess and attraction. Many times a day, we are seduced by images of wish fulfillment. Many times a day, we are invited to consider the disappointments of our own lives.

Vancouver artist Susan Bozic’s Dating Portfolio is a series of fifteen photographs that describe the iconic moments of the modern dating ritual as staged by the artist and a male store window mannequin she calls Carl. Through the series of images, the two unlikely lovebirds enact simple pleasures, from sharing a coffee in a café or enjoying a picnic, to more glamourous dates such as yachting and drinking champagne on a private jet. Taken as a whole, the dream-like images tell a story of the progressive staging of declarations of love, from casual meetings in public places to increasingly elaborate, formal dates. The narrative describes a modern dating ritual that is both humorous and psychologically complex, revealing dating as a socially constructed behaviour. The Dating Portfolio is a series of projections from the point of view of the female subject who is the active agent in the creation of every scene. Bozic’s store-window mannequin brings into relief the fantasy driving these images and defines an empty space of desire within the perfected image of relational happiness. The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images, functions as an ironic site of unrequited longing.

Bozic’s images combine the aesthetic values of commercial photography – contrived, tightly composed scenes, highly focused and controlled lighting, extensively refinished surfaces in post-production – with scenarios derived from romance literature and illustrated consumer advertising. The enacted photograph, the stock-in-trade of commercial photography, is a medium ideally suited for the visual realization of a contemporary idea of classical perfection. Conventionally used to sell hair and skin care products, make-up, spring wardrobes and automobiles, commercial photography is in the business of spinning dreams. Other-worldly glamour is lent to people and things through staged scenes of luxury and comfort that arephotographed in highly controlled lighting and polished through post-production photographic manipulation.2 Bodies can be toned and slimmed, images of food can be made to seem more appetizing than in real life, interior design and gardens can be rendered as small corners of heaven. In the enacted photograph and in the photographic still-life, every visible detail can be controlled and perfected, every gesture and nuance can be scripted. Life can be messy. Photographs can be perfect.

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Eating popcorn and smiling a big, cover-girl smile, a young woman sits in a movie theatre curled under the arm of a store-window mannequin. The contrast of that smile and that stiff embrace is simultaneously humourous and disconcerting. Bozic calls the image He let me pick the movie – the “He” being, of course, her imaginary boyfriend Carl, the male mannequin with whom she sits in the cinema. The couple in the movie theatre is an icon of happiness and as such, He let me pick the movie doesn’t fail to charm. It is an image that generously communicates a flush of warm thoughts: the pleasure of human sociability, the warmth of companionship, the social approval of a public relationship and the thrill of romantic love. The movie theatre is a democratic space – indifferent to class or wealth. They eat popcorn – so we know it’s a light comedy or a popular  film, a passing diversion – neither high art nor serious documentary. Between them, there is no question of status or power or money. The charm of the image is in the absence of guile: the couple is there for no other reason than they simply enjoy each other’s company.

The charming images depicting simple shared pleasures in the Dating Portfolio eventually give way to an escalating fantasy of devotion and adoration. This is the fantasy of “Carl’s girlfriend.” Every activity is imagined from the point of view of her desire. The titles of the photographs name the things that Carl has done for her: He let me pick the movie; Carl takes me to the nicest places; He surprised me with a romantic getaway; He remembered our anniversary. Her imaginary boyfriend is so good in fact, that he is able to anticipate her needs in images such as All I said was my feet were a little sore, and He’s so thoughtful, it wasn’t even my birthday. Each consecutive image in The Dating Portfolio builds toward the inevitable emotional crescendo of the white wedding, a fantasy of mutual adoration codified in popular women’s literature, music and cinema.

Bozic’s staging of the Dating Portfolio recalls the highly aestheticized narratives of traditional romance fiction.  In its styling, the portfolio reprises the cover illustrations of the so-called “marriage” sub-genre of romance fiction, where marriage is the ultimate goal and the story-line traces a growing but somewhat dispassionate love. Marriage romances typically featured illustrations of attractive, well-groomed couples decorously, if stiffly, embracing.3 The lack of passion in this genre may account for the crucial role of the mannequin in Bozic’s restaging of the fantasy. However, she has updated the genre in many ways. The sketchy pastel renderings of the traditional romance covers are replaced here by saturated hues, satiny shimmer and the sharp-focus gleam of polished surfaces. In the image The picnic was his idea, the budding romance takes place under a clear blue sky and beneath falling cherry blossoms. In He remembered our anniversary, there is little left to chance in the wardrobe or setting. Carl’s girlfriend meets him at the door in pearls, embroidered satin skirt and matching satin shoes.

In Carl takes me to the nicest places the pair are out on the town in matching black. The marriage fantasy in the images is strongly equated with a fundamental materialist ethos. Make-up, hair and wardrobe are always fresh and perfect for the occasion. Deeper passion is equated with greater expense and better clothes. There is little that is spontaneous or left to chance in The Dating Portfolio.  In her aestheticizing of the dating ritual, Bozic describes for us a  culture in which the material qualities of life trump life itself.

If consumerism may be a characteristic particular to our time, commercial photography has lent itself well to the promotion of consumer values. In the Dating Portfolio, Bozic has referenced the photographic advertising conventions of magazine and billboard advertisements for jewellery, liquor, clothing and tourist destinations. Her actors enact their devotions to each other on a conventional stage, facing an unseen audience. Glamour is the focus of every shot, whether  it is mountains, pearls, champagne or apparel. Bozic moves beyond the conventions of commercial still photography in Bedroom, however, where the mannequin’s back to the camera recalls the conventional and economical staging of the daytime soap opera. Little is expended here in terms of adornment, the focus being on the anticipation of sex. Images such as Photo Booth and All I said was my feet were a bit sore point to a greater naturalism – seemingly referencing spontaneous photo booth sessions or casual snapshots. Yet even these apparently spontaneously captured moments have been codified, conventionalized, and marketed as signifiers of “unaffected” charm and affection.

The marketing of images of affection in cinema, television, and publicity plays on the inherent voyeurism of people and the Dating Portfolio images work within this convention. We have become accustomed to living vicariously through the emotional lives of celebrities and actors. The viewer of popular media functions as a fly on the wall, unseen by the actors who pretend to be in intimate situations and who behave as if there was no one watching, making the viewer's experience akin to that of a peeping-tom. Each episode produces a frisson of excitement similar to the feeling we get from looking through someone else’s private photos, or coming across someone's discarded photo-booth pictures, where we are afforded a fraction of a second of someone else's interior life.

The fantasy of Carl’s girlfriend’s that Bozic describes is clearly as hollow as Carl. While we are charmed by these images of simple affection and by the more elaborate displays of devotion, and drawn to the aura of glamour each image holds, there is a hole in the centre of  the picture. Carl’s girlfriend seems not to notice that her dream date is a dud. His perfect hair and rugged jaw line are only a cartoon fantasy of maleness. The viewer can’t help but laugh – perhaps at her naiveté, perhaps at our own. Is the joke on us? The empty space, or the lack, represented by the male mannequin in Bozic’s images is ironic, making reference to desire through the absence of its object.  The enacted scenes are expressions of Carl’s girlfriend’s need for approval and for displays of affection and of her desire for unconditional love. One criticism of romance fiction is that such fantasy becomes a substitute for agency in women. To quote Germaine Greer, “This is the hero that women have chosen for themselves. The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage.”4  

In Susan Bozic’s the Dating Portfolio, the emperor has no clothes. The imprisoning agent of her heroine’s desire is revealed as an empty shell. The artist mocks the fantasy of prince charming, and the contemporary culture of materialism associated with it, ironically asserting the emptiness of that dream. With the Dating Portfolio, Bozic directs our attention to the difficulties of establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships in a world of increasing atomization, digitization, and materialism, where face-to-face contact seems increasingly elusive. But the dream persists, even if the centre is hollow. Desire, that need for physical and emotional completion, persists even after we think we have deconstructed its political biases. We desire a connection to someone who listens to us, understands us, protects us and adores us. The possibility and promise of human connection suggest that with it, everything is beautiful and everything is possible. Instead, the desire for human completion remains chimerical – its emotional consolation a sterile and destructive dream of limitless consumption.

1. Cf. Naomi Rosenblum, who suggests that, “Camera images have been able to make invented ‘realities’ seem not at all fraudulent and have permitted viewers to suspend disbelief while remaining aware that the scene has been contrived.” Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 1984, p. 495.

2. Historically, photographic retouching was done using the airbrush. Contemporary photographic manipulation is now primarily digital, involving computer programs – the most popular being Photoshop.

3. Jennifer McKnight-Trontz, The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 35.

4. Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 176.