Max Streicher’s Inflatables

In his development of the inflatable as kinetic and interactive artwork, Max Streicher has located images of our greatest joys and our deepest fears. Combining industrial fans and simple valve mechanisms with light and papery materials, Streicher animates his fabric forms with an effortless naturalism which recalls,quite eerily, the sensation of breath. Often drawing on literary and biblical sources for his imagery, Streicher’s work provokes strong, spontaneous, and deeply psychological reactions in people of all ages and backgrounds. 

Born in Alberta, Canada in 1958, Max Streicher’s early interests were in the areas of theology and English literature. He later transferred from the seminary to studies in visual art, completing degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level. Graduating from the Master of Fine Arts programme at York University in Toronto in the late 1980s, Streicher gravitated to the artist run spaces and artist collectives that were beginning to gain prominence in the Canadian art world in the early 90s. 

Artist collectives in the 1990s emerged in part as a response to a withering economic recession in Canada, and they quickly moved to fill the void of a collapsing art economy. Groups of artists began producing exhibitions and art events unmediated by established curators and they were making and exhibiting art that was often far outside the pre-existing commercial mainstream. The collective exhibitions seemed to fit a new cultural mood in the country, one that had grown sceptical of the art market and weary of the hype that characterized international art in the 1980s. Resembling less conventional exhibitions than spontaneous actions and ephemeral performances, the artist collective exhibitions were evidence of the presence of a new generation of artists emerging from Canadian university art programmes. This new generation was not only prepared to do it themselves, they were also trained in post-modern cultural criticism and saw themselves as part of a larger international cultural revolution in the making – deconstructing the ideologically loaded art object and proposing feminist and post-colonial critiques of the institutions of Western culture.

It is in this context that Max Streicher produced his first inflatable work, Breathe(1989), exhibited at the Bloor Street United Church in Toronto.[1]It was Streicher’s first work after graduate school, a response to the new freedom from the demands of graduate school, a piece he later described as being at the time whimsical – “a lark.”[2]It consisted of a sewn nylon bag, inflated by a vacuum cleaner. Breatheemerged from a series of free association drawings the artist was making in the months just after having completed graduate school. One of the drawings depicted two ram’s heads connected at the nose by a pipe. Open to the vagaries of chance and happy accidents, Streicher came across a vacuum cleaner and a sewing machine in the street, which he incorporated in the final work. The finished piece was brought to life by the spectator who activated a timer, initiating the inflation of a sewn nylon bag. Each time Breatheinflated, it became a giant stiffening ram's horn, while the vacuum made a remarkably loud and high-pitched sound, contrasting, not incidentally, with the otherwise serene church interior. There was something slightly rude about the piece: its size and noise and its suggestion of a male erection – the kind of iconoclasm possible only by a former seminary student.[3]At the end of the timed inflation, the whine of the vacuum would stop, the form would gently sag, droop and return to a tousled mass on the floor. The anti-sculptural act of deflation was as dramatic as the work’s inflation, an element that reoccurs in Streicher’s later inflatable work. 

Breathemade an impression on many people, including John Dickson andLylaRye, who were looking for artists to form the collective which came to be known as Nether Mind.[4]Nether Mind’s first exhibition took place in an old industrial basement in the King Street West area of Toronto. Streicher exhibited the work Boilerin this inaugural show, a work which is essentially an elaboration of Breathe. The figures in Boiler were conceived as tripedal bunny suits – each with three ears, arms and legs tapered to points, like abstracted jesters. Viewers animated the pieces by engaging separate fan switches for each ‘figure,’ allowing the viewer the power to choreograph their movements.The inflation, much like Breathe, was startling – the gloomy setting of the installation only enhancing their frightening presence. 

For Boiler, Streicher had discoveredTyvek, DuPont's brand name for a water resistant synthetic paper, made from very fine, high-density polyethylene fibres. Tyvek behaves much like a hybrid of paper and fabric: it is lightweight, smooth, opaque and very “durable” – well suited to being sewn – and in its commercial form, bright white. It is primarily used as a vapour barrier in home construction, as a material for coveralls for painters and for toxic waste clean‑up. Its relative impermeability is perfect for holding air. Its papery lightness responds easily to changes in air pressure and became, for Streicher, an expressive medium capable of suggesting living flesh. 

The white, airy lightness and billowy softness of the Tyvek inevitably recall clouds. In Where There Is Smoke(1992) Streicher executed a private commission in the manner of a baroque ceiling painter, suggesting the illusion of an opening through the roof to the sky. It is a caricature of a cloud or of a plume of smoke – a pulsating vision animated by varying air currents. Another play on this theme is Pillars of Cloud, (1992). The Pillars of Cloudwere mounted on modified golf carts and inflated by the squeezing of a hand-break mechanism. The title is a Biblical reference to when Yahwehwas leading the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness – leading them"by a pillar of cloud by day . . . and a pillar of fire by night."[5]In the process of realization, the soft billowy cloud forms gradually came to resemble more the sharp "peaks of church steeples and Thai architecture."[6]These pillars of cloud are like modern conveniences or consumer appliances – personal augers to the promised land of consumerism – and seem as though they should be available at any department or hardware store. 

Streicher’s fullest elaboration on this theme, however, came in the work Cloud, exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004. Hovering a little under two metres above the floor,Cloudtowers upwards to a height of ten metres. Apart from the stunning and uncanny presence of a cloud in an enclosed space, the spectator was offered the opportunity of entering the piece, by simply ducking under its bottom edge, giving new meaning to the experience of “having your head in the clouds.”[7]Indeed,Cloudwas inspired by Streicher’sinitial encounter with the proposed exhibition space, the Tannenbaum Atrium at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the gridded floor andairy, light‑filled two‑storey atrium recalled for the artist a memory of flying over the Western Canadian prairies, – a feeling of being in and around clouds, a feeling Streicher likens to being inside a painting by Tiepolo or Correggio. 

A counter-point to Streicher’s impressionism is his interest in the intersections of spirituality, commercialism and consumerism – a theme illustrated in Pillars of Cloudand elaborated in the work this flesh . . .(1993). this flesh . . .featured a 16 mm film loop of an appropriated advertising inflatable effigy crudely painted to resemble the Toronto discount retailer Honest Ed with two sewn-on arms spread wide to welcome (or bless?) shoppers. The image was projected on an arrangement of four mirrors that fragmented the image and enhanced the cruciform character of the inflatable. The cruciform resemblance of the Honest Ed effigy may be merely coincidental, but the Christ-like death and resurrection character of many of Streicher's figurative inflatables is hard to miss. Streicher’s interest in theology in part reflected a fascination with the forces that animate matter. While the forces in his work are mechanical, his figures, even at their most abstract, inflate like heaving chests, and pulsate like beating hearts. They are present as physical bodies and remind us of life as both miraculous and ephemeral. 

The Endgame series began in 1999 continued a similar critique of consumer society. Endgamewas inspired by Samuel Beckett’s play featuring the two tragically absurd characters Hamm and Clov. In Streicher’s outdoor installation gigantic inflated clown heads inhabit various urban locals. The heads lay on their backs, sometimes bobbing and buffeted by the wind. Seemingly oblivious to the elements and to the commercial life of the city below them, the heads appear to gaze at the sky with expressions that read as a combination of bewilderment, alarm, and awe. With their ridiculous size and bold simple contours, they resemble advertising released from its commercial moorings. The heads appear to gaze at the sky with expressions that read as a combination of bewilderment, alarm, and awe. Instead of engaging and seducing the viewer with promises of gratification these characters are freed from commercial responsibility. They redirect our gaze to the passing clouds. They are an invocation to beingas opposed to buying.

A major theme in Streicher’s inflatable sculpture has been the figure. First intimated at in the work Boiler, with its abstract yet unmistakably anthropomorphic character, the figure in Streicher’s hands could be frightening, but also, and more often, somewhat ridiculous and pathetic. Quartet in a Box (1995) is four inflatable figures arranged in a circle, each connected to an air source through the top of the head. Each figure pulses and writhes as a rotating valve mechanism changes the air pressure to each figure. The spectator recoils with feelings of revulsion and morbidity as they inflate, recognizing in their jerking and quivering a kind of physical seizure – bodies out of control. 

Sextet(1996) was an enlargement of the Quartet in a Boxmodel. The Sextet figures were 1.5 times life size and they were attached at the navel with flexible duct that ran to a central mechanism. Each figure would strike a different pose; some sitting upright with splayed legs, arms lifting at their sides. As the valve mechanism rotated it would send an alternating pulse of air from figure to figure. This movement takes place quickly, creating the impression of a frantic, manic energy – reckless, dizzying and out of control.

With the introduction of simple electrical switching mechanisms Streicher found the ability to animate his figures with greater dramatic effect. Balancing Act(1995) consists of a pair of figures suspended from the ceiling that appear to exchange breath through rubber tubes inserted in the mouth. As each figure inflates, its chest fills and its arms thrust forward, while the back arches and legs and feet stiffen to a point. As it deflates, the stiffness slowly disappears and the legs dangle limply. The inflation is alternating, so that one figure is always inflating while the other is deflating. Streicher likens the effect to a dance, amechanical and preposterously literal variation on Nijinsky’s expiring dance in the Rites of Spring. The power of this work is that when a figure loses air, it is seemingly the illusion of physical life itself that disappears – vanishes in front of our eyes – becoming nothing more than a limp cloth bag. Quickly and unconsciously, we become intimate with these figures. As they inflate and we hear air rush into the body, we form a sort of interspecies bond – the kind of bond one might feel watching the breathing of a sleeping companion.[8]These works focus on the central role of air and the imitation of breathing, and the many emotions that it elicits. We breathe differently when asleep and awake, when we are nervous, when we are calm. By adjusting and controlling the rhythm, the sound and the speed of inflation and deflation, the artist controls these perceptions and tells a story. Currents of air in the work of Max Streicher are indeed feelings given form.

Recent works Blow(2004) and Romulus and Remus(2005) share the same mechanics, applied here to an even more dramatic effect. Returning to this theme almost ten years after Balancing Act, Streicher seems to have exchanged the gentle symbiotic melancholy of the former for a brutal co-dependency. Connected through the backs by a short piece of flexible duct, Blowand Romulus and Remusresemble blow-up Siamese twins. Not only do the figures inflate more quickly and forcefully, but unlike Balancing Act, where one figure passively deflated as the other inflated,now the inflating figure literally sucks the air from its counterpart. InBlowand Romulus and Remusdeflation is experienced empathetically, as though it were a human expiration.

Fascinated with the effect of complete deflation, Streicher decided to show these diaphanous works vacuum packed, flatted and on the wall. In 2004 this idea evolved into a series of photograms, where light replaces air in bringing his inflatable figures to life. The photograms, like the inflatables, have a ghostly animus, a sense of a fleeting presence, a remnant or trace of a mysterious, now departed being. These images are created by positioning deflated and flattened figures directly on a large format photographic paper and exposing them to light. The translucency of the nylon spinnaker allows light to pass through it and on to the photographic paper creating fascinating and subtle tonal gradations. What emerges within the silver gelatine emulsion is the impression of a figure. The subtle shading is the result of the folding and overlapping of the material when the figure is flattened, yet these figures appear three dimensional. The seams, the result of Streicher’s inflatable fabrication process, create lines that read as various internal systems – musculature, nerves, and veins. It is neither a literal three dimensional rendering, nor a representation of the fully inflated figure. These images have the mysterious and puzzling appearance of some unconventional imaging source, of an ultrasound perhaps, or the x-ray of ancient mummified corpse. 

Scale as a element in Streicher’s inflatables was on the artist’s mind as early as 1993 when he appropriated the image of the Honest Ed inflatable in this flesh . . .The version of Boilerexhibited in the at the Power Plant exhibition in 1994 was a scaled-up version of the original to twice life‑size.[9]It was also around that time that he began to develop ideas for the gigantic Swan Song, for an exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge in 1996.[10]

 “My intention is to overwhelm the gallery space and impose on the viewer a sense of scale like that which a toddler might experience. I am attempting to recreate a situation like that of childhood encounters with humongous snow banks or haystacks; structures that invite a physical exuberance which in turn leads the imagination. . . In this work I want to physically embrace the viewer within a tension between pleasure and threat, enchantment and self reflexive awareness.”[11]

Sleeping Giants, (1998), and Streicher’s later version Silenus(2002), bring together the phenomenology of the physical body first ventured in Quartet in a Boxwith the scale of Swan Song. The giants in their great mass heave and sigh to the timed intervals of the blowers. Lying on their backs and sides, heads rise from the floor, legs stiffen, and chests inflate, only to relax again, as if in some futile attempt to get out of bed or off the couch. The giants recall the body as gross anatomy – of a soul trapped within spoilable flesh, and the dispirited body, incapable of action because of the sentiment of futility. The giants also recall the tragic body, the self-perpetuating machine – needy, voracious, desiring – independent of consciousness and will. 

Floating Giants(2001) installed at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation building in Toronto, combined Streicher’s interest in high-wire acrobats and oversized figures. Fabricated from nylon spinnaker, the Floating Giantsare held aloft by helium balloons and tethered to the ground by a flexible duct that also fills them with air. Measuringseven metres tall but nearly weightless, they ascend and fall, bouncing in the breeze. They are courageous and vulnerable – the image of a naïve fantasy – a dream of flying.

Streicher’s bestiary of works including Swan Song(1996), Stuck Unicorn (2003), Four Horses(2003) and now Dung Beetle(2005) are an elaboration of the metaphorical possibilities that he began with his figurative work. With Swan Song,Streicher sought a “threatening beauty,” choosing the swan because as an animal it is commonly known as a symbol of beauty and elegance, but at the same time feared for its strength and its potential for violence. Yard upon yard of silky white Tyvek pulsates and roars from the industrial fans, creating an experience for the viewer to wade through that is simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish. As in a dream, the scale is distorted and no contour is solid – everything collapses to the touch or seems beyond reach. 

Equestrian Monument #1, (2003) Stuck Unicorn (2003)andFour Horses (2003)upset expectations that come from the history of equestrian sculpture. In stark opposition to, for example, Verrocchio’s Equestrian Monument of Bartolommeo Colleoni (ca. 1481), a bronze monument to military prowess, Streicher’s air-filled horses slumber improbably on roof tops like nesting pigeons. Shifting and nodding in the wind they appear to survey the human traffic below with blithe indifference. Too puffy and weak in the knees to consider galloping away, these horses are, like their Endgamecounterparts Hamm and Clov, contently indolent.

Dung Beetle(2005) is a 9-metre-long black beetle lying on its back. Like Endgame, Streicher has returned to classic existentialist literature for his inspiration, in this case Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. And like Endgame, Dung Beetle embodies a similarly implicit critique of the culture of publicity, as the body of beetle is not made from Streicher’sfavouredTyvek or nylon spinnaker, but from vinyl that has been recycled from billboard advertising. The tragedy of Gregor Samsa’s new insect body in Kafka’s Metamorphosis is related through the reactions of his horrified family. Streicher places us all in the position of family members – sympathizers with a pointless and futile struggle, witnesses to a ghastly and unmentionable spectacle. 

The inflatable as art – the balloon, the soap bubble, the inflatable toy – is something we typically dedicate to children. Max Streicher has taken the inflatable, the prepubescent symbol of wonder and tragedy and rehabilitated it, or rather; he has given it an adult life. He has done this not by stripping the inflatable of those characteristics that appeal to children, but by probing those aspects that are fundamental to understanding ourselves. He creates tension between the playfulness of the medium and an experience that is both physical and empathetic. We favour children with balloons and they in turn are fascinated by their lightness, enthralled by their buoyancy, and devastated when they break. With each balloon, we create a round, pudgy, brightly coloured life – symbolizing at once our joy in creation and our awareness of life's fragility. And therein lies its magic: the inflatable makes the abstract character of our organic existence visible. We know we were born from nothing, we feel our breath now, and we know that we will expire. 

Gordon Hatt 

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[1]The Crossing, Bloor St. United Church, coordinated by Mediums Art Centre, Toronto.

[2]Conversation with the Artist, 1998.

[3]Streicher’s free association drawings, recycled tools and found parts recall the tradition of artist flâneurs – those artists and writers from Baudelaire to Breton to Debord who traversed the city in states of distracted attention, cultivating random, spontaneous associations, drawing on the unconscious and the urban environment as a source and site for poetry. 

[4]Other artists exhibiting with Nether Mind included Tom Dean, Catherine Heard, Greg Hefford, Mickey McCarty, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Carl Skelton, Anastasia Tzekas, and Manrico Venere. 

[5]"The Lord was going before them in a pillar of cloud by day to lead them on the way, and in a pillar of fire by night to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. He did not take away the pillar of cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people" (Exodus 13:21-22).

[6]Interview with the artist, March 20, 1998.

[7]Similarly, in the work Pleasure Dome(1997) exhibited at Pyramida Centre for Contemporary Art, Haifa, Israel, Streicher invited viewers to step inside, to share the sensations of being inside the piece.

[8]Yet, as Streicher is aware, “the source of that breath, industrial fans and rather crudely fashioned valve mechanisms, are reminiscent of respirators or some equally intrusive medical gadget, and this breath is not life, just its sobering mechanics.”

[9]Naked State, curated by Louise Dompierre and Arthur Renwick, The Power Plant, Toronto,1994.

[10]This piece was also exhibited at the Art Gallery of Peterborough in 2002 under the title Lamentation.

[11]Artist's statement, February 1998.

The Dream of Painting and Angela Leach's Thirty-Two Colours*

*Ivory, Buff White, Buff Medium, Buff, Tan, Coral, Pumpkin, Salmon, Red, Wine, Grape, Purple, Deep Periwinkle, Indigo Periwinkle, Indigo, Blue, Aqua II, Aqua, Mint, Mint Light, Lime, Lime Light, Lemon, Lemon Light, Leaf, Olive, Khaki, Forest, Ebony, Oak, Walnut and Mink

Once, while looking at a painting by Angela Leach, it occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was to jump inside it. Not normally given over to wild physical expressions of enthusiasm for an artist's work, and naturally prevented by the limitations of the medium, I instead remained standing before it. The feeling, however, was rare enough to remark upon. How often do I encounter paintings that are visually thrilling? How often do I encounter a painting whose presence is so physically pleasurable, that I want to get inside it and roll around?

* * *

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Angela Leach studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and at Sheridan College's School of Crafts and Design in Oakville, Ontario. Having been introduced to the discipline of painting at OCAD and to textile design at Sheridan College, Leach eventually found her way to a marriage of the two. In nineteen ninety-two, around the same time as she began working as a commercial hand weaver, she started working on a series of paintings called Abstract Repeat. Nineteen ninety-seven marked the beginning of her signature Abstract Repeat Wave series, whose basic linear formula - the intersection of repeated horizontal simple waves with vertically repeated sine waves - has continued to the present. With the intersection of these two waves at critical points Leach creates the illusion of linear perspective. Each successive sine wave moving across the surface of the painting appears to taper and thicken in proximity to the next wave. This attenuation leaves the impression of a spatial recession characterized by a rolling wave. Leach then applies to these drawings a restricted colour palette of thirty-two colours that she organizes in complex repeating patterns. By repeating a sequence of colour placed in order from dark to light, for example, following the placement of the four darkest colours, she can complete a painting as a series of logical next steps.  By altering the sequence or the colour key, Leach can create an almost infinite variety of unique colour patterns.  

Most observers of Leach's work, however, have tended to focus on the optical illusions generated by her drawing and compare her to the British Op artist Bridget Riley. While Riley uses elements of graphic design and colour theory to achieve her optical effects, Leach's images are arrived at as intellectually conceived complex repeating patterns. Colour rarely plays an illusory role in Leach's work. It is simply there. In thirty-two infinitely varying parts.

* * *

There is a dream about painting that it is a pure thing, and that the act of painting can magically connect directly to feeling - not needing or using language or symbols. Colour and mark-making in this dream don't signify or describe ideas and feelings - they are ideas and feeling that, through magic or the genius of the artist, and with the requisite labour pains, may be born as pure uncorrupted feeling on canvas, as painting, and as art.

That's the dream, anyway. Unfortunately (or fortunately), artists are not mood rings that simply emote colour. Pure painting exists only in the world of dreams because during the process of painting, consciousness asserts itself. The artist must choose colour. Colour must be mixed - the quality of the hue, tone, opacity or translucency must be considered. It must be applied with the correct consistency, and dry with the appropriate gloss or matte surface. If it is wrong, the artist removes it and tries again, or the canvas is discarded and another is started.

Consciousness asserts itself in the viewer as well. Colours and marks can generate lateral associations and trigger unintended responses in the viewer. References may awaken the memory of other works of art, to other times and places, and to mundane things. Any colour may recall not only a similar colour in some other painting, but also the colour of a dinner napkin, a piece of commercial packaging, or perhaps an article of clothing. That little drip of paint can start to look uncomfortably like some other artist's little drips, and that spot of yellow may look too much like the yellow on that box of laundry detergent that just went out in the recycling this morning. All of which is okay if that is the ride the artist wants to take you on. An X-Ray of the artist's soul, however, it most probably is not.

Which brings me to Angela Leach's colour charts, the sheets of paper filled with tiny hand printed colour names, which she brings out when asked about her preliminary sketches. Leach doesn't make colour renderings per se, she makes lists of colours, columns of colour names, maybe a page or a page and half of colour names for each painting. Colour, for Leach, is a game where all possible combinations and outcomes exist only to be explored. She doesn't make an emotional investment in any one colour or set of colours. She has only a vague idea what a painting will look like when she begins, how its dominant colouration might appear. In her system of charts and lists, colours change - spectrally from warm to cool and back again. They skip and repeat in predetermined sequences. She is interested in how colour mutates, how it can start out as one thing and become its opposite. Leach's thirty-two colours may be analogous to the musical twelve-tone scale, where all notes on the scale are given equal value - the closest comparator perhaps being the rhythmic polytonal repeating patterns of Phillip Glass's compositions.

In the end, her colour patterns resist logical or sequential apprehension. They actively push back when you try to understand them in relationship to each other. Her patterns may coalesce into a virtual waterfall of shifting colour values or fragment into seemingly infinitely variegated and contrasting groupings. But I can't figure it. Every time I think I have found the key to one of her colour schemes, it starts to come undone. The repeating pattern changes - the colour I anticipate should be there, isn't. And maybe that's as it should be.

* * *

I stand before these paintings and I am enthralled, as I observe how the artist has been able to construct from the same box of colours both gentle spectral shifts, and vibrating complementary contrasts. Enigmatic highlights appear to shine, and curious dark spaces appear to recede. Tonal areas and patterns at times seem to levitate above the surface, spontaneously and unexplainably, like the appearance of crop circles or mirages. Having failed to enter these paintings both physically and syntactically, I have returned to the surface, where I am seduced by appearance, and where Angela Leach's paintings gently toss and roll, hover and settle, sparkle, vibrate and shimmer.

Gordon Hatt, 2003

Paulette Phillips: The Secret Life of Criminals

Like a kaleidoscope the image multiplies, distorts and blends beyond recognition. In The Secret Life of Criminals (2000) the reflected video images of contortionist Jinny Jacinto’s impossibly malleable legs twist and spiral up the inside of the cone and stretch until they seem to touch your nose. You are literally sucked into this woman’s world, which is both familiar yet also so alien. Comprised of a stainless steel cone mounted over a small LCD screen, The Secret Life of Criminals has the appearance of a laboratory experiment. The viewer participates, looking through the cone at a putative criminal (as the title of this work invites you to believe) and becomes part of this experiment, to become both the investigator and the investigated, to lean over and look through the cone to see, and to become part of the image.

* * *

Writer, performer, filmmaker, videographer, installation artist: Paulette Phillips has combined the varied facets of her art practice of twenty years to create The Secret Life of Criminals – a series of video installations that marry short dramatic performances and staged scenarios with the texture and three dimensionality of installation sculpture. The “apparatus of delivery” as Phillips call it – the projectors, the screens and supports – are the physical component of her work. These objects are not a mere media “means to an end” but are integral to her shaping our apprehension of her work. The apparatus of delivery is by turns disruptive or expressive, either confounding our habits of viewing or extending the metaphors and symbols of the recorded drama into real space.

Phillips's video installations disrupt traditional narrative structures and collapse the comfortable space we place between ourselves and the fictions we are invited to consider. Her fictions are, however, only half that – they are true stories heard, events seen and felt, investigations without resolution – facts that live large as both individual and collective apprehensions of the world.

Influenced by the political theatre of Bertolt Brecht, and by contemporary theories of narrative, each work by Phillips is an essay into the space of the viewer.[1] Each work is an attempt to blur the line between the observer and the observed, to compromise the viewer, to destabilize the leering, judgmental gaze and to engage us as inherently prurient – as both voyeurs and a co-authors of the tragedies played out before us. Phillips invites us into scenarios and dramas and sculptural environments that penetrate our contentment and direct us to recall the source of our own compulsive narratives and adult anxieties. The viewer is never allowed the luxury of turning out the lights, to slump down in the anonymity of a dark viewing room to empathize with some tragic narrative, or to be swept away by the artful evocation of sublimity. We are instead constantly recalled to our physical circumstance, to our own position as observers and participants in the spectacle before us.

* * *

It is obviously staged, but that seems not to matter. The image is appalling just the same. “It’s about how people judge appearance” (2000) is a flat panel video monitor, built into the wall and framed in pink faux ostrich skin leather. On screen, a woman walking in an alley approaches the concrete base of a loading dock. She deliberately, and with considerable force, proceeds to smash her own head against it. The camera follows her from the left as she steadies herself on the adjacent wall with her right arm and focuses on the concrete.

She is visibly counting:

One, she inclines forward, then pulls back.

Two, she inclines forward more strongly and again pulls back.

Three, she leans back sharply at the waist, closes her eyes and launches herself head-first into the concrete.

The action is accompanied by a sound – something like a pumpkin smashing or a watermelon dropped from a height – a sound that is very credibly that of a skull being crushed.

Phillips’s unfortunate heroine bounces off the wall and the camera changes angle. We see her from the front now. She recoils and slumps to her knees with a bloody gash on her head. Steadying herself, she struggles to stand up, touching her hand to the wound. Phillips doesn’t leave it at that, however. She plays out the scene twice more in different edits, before it is looped to begin again. You watch the loop once, twice, maybe three times before it becomes too much, and then you turn away. But of course the image remains.

Real and enacted violence directed at others is an ancient form of entertainment. Codified in folklore and myth, perfected as spectacle in the Roman games, rationalized as a source of wealth in professional sports and now a multi-billion dollar corporate industry of film, television and electronic games, the representation of outwardly directed violence is an expression of the commonly held inner desire to strike out and to be decisively effective. We want to become super heroes. We recognize in our emotional responses to violence a primal desire for domination, a fantasy of freedom from coercion and an escape from feelings of powerlessness. Violence as spectacle plays a redemptive role in our popular culture and it is as American as apple pie, as Canadian as maple syrup, as common as dirt.

The image of a woman smashing her head against a wall remains indelible (forget the fact that she gets up and walks away in the end – this does not let her, or us, off the hook), as do many of Paulette Phillips’s images, because that violence is self-inflicted. Self-directed violence, lacking the conventional de-sublimating energies associated with striking out, isn’t widely consumed as entertainment. Buffoons and tragic heroes don’t inflict injury on themselves – their injury is unintentionally the result of foolish neglect or unavoidable fate. We laugh at the buffoon, a subtle maliciousness, not far from violent fantasies of superiority and domination. We identify with tragic heroes mawkishly, as valiant characters like ourselves – comrades with whom we bravely, and at great sacrifice, strive against all odds.

Clearly, “It’s about how people judge appearance.” recounts an unpleasant truth. Phillips’s troubling image illustrates how far these fantasies of domination are from the lives we lead. Neither heroes nor buffoons, our demons are invisible and complex, as much the product of our own minds as invading foreign bodies. We pathologically internalize and nurture our psychic pain, obsess over our shortcomings, nurse our emotional injuries and repeatedly act out our dysfunctional narratives. The subject lashes out, not at some other poor soul, but against the self, inflicting harm as a means of making emotional pain physical and visible – stimulating pain and denying pleasure to generate feeling and to stave off existential emptiness and hollowness.

Self-inflicted violence is an acting out of the text, “I feel like bashing my head against a wall,” or “I want to injure myself,” or even the milder and seemingly innocuous, “I want to deny myself pleasure.” It is not a frustration against the outside, it is a revolt of the inside. Even if it doesn’t present itself in such dramatic terms as head bashing, it may be more commonly manifest in, say, the refusal to participate in something that might be pleasurable or beneficial, or risky behaviour that verges on the reckless.

On another level, Phillips’s protagonists are invariably female, part of the profile of the typical victim of self-directed violence. Making bad choices and repeat offending is clearly a universal malaise, but the particular masochism of self-injury represented by Phillips in her work speaks to us of a pathology most often associated with women and victims of sexual abuse. Andrea Dworkin provides a troubling narrative to this particular gender dysphoria:

The female life-force itself is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic; that is, we are driven toward pain and abuse, toward self-destruction, toward annihilation – and this drive toward our own negation is precisely what identifies us as women. In other words, we are born so that we may be destroyed. Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity.[2]

Or maybe not. Dworkin’s pessimism leaves out the possibility for agency and makes all women out to be victims, while Phillips marvels at the motivation of her protagonists – that they are not frozen by their lives but moved to act in such a dramatic, if self-destructive, fashion.

* * *

            O sublime Goddess! O naked oneness!

            What is the meaning of your nakedness?

            Are you shameless, Divine Lady?

            Yet even when discarding

            royal silks, and golden ornaments

            for earrings, bracelets, and anklets

            fashioned from human bone,

            you retain the dignity of bearing

            suited to the daughter of a king.[3]

In the video installation Ecstasy, (2001) two asynchronous videos follow the progress of a woman walking in a snowy and barren industrial lot. Presented on a glass shelf, the image on the left is projected on its surface from above, while on the right another image appears on an adjacent LCD which sits in a depression in the glass. The projected image on the left focuses on the woman’s journey, while the LCD images follow the ground, passing over the snow and the rocks and the stalks of dead grasses that crunch underfoot. The LCD image feels like a monitor – it operates the way our eyes scan the ground, like an extension of the self, a material sensor for where we are in the world. The projection, by contrast, feels like a narrative or a myth. It has the warm glow of the projected image, a reality even more ephemeral than the hardwired LCD screen.

We follow the image of the woman in the heavy coat and hood who emerges from the tall reeds. She tosses her hood back and loosens her coat to hang from her shoulders, and then to slide down her arms. She pulls the coat tightly around her, takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, then kneels down, pressing her forehead into the snow. She rolls on to her back, gathers fistfuls of snow on to herself, then spreads her arms and legs to make a snow angel.

We watch her get up, slip off her coat, carefully fold it and place it on the ground. She removes her gloves and boots, places them beside her coat and begins to walk again, untying her hair and shaking it out. She removes her dress, her tights and her underwear, and lies down on her side in the snow, where she remains motionless. The LCD on the right holds this image – an image of a reclining (or is it recumbent?) woman who is “nude” and who seems to have become part of the landscape, while the projected image frames from above a woman who is “naked,” lying in the snow, zooming in on the head, zooming out, zooming in again like the subject of some television homicide drama, then panning the ground and the milkweed pods and the sky to begin the loop again. On the right and left the images overlap at the point where the woman and the ground appear to have become one.

Presenting the two images on the shelf, Phillips makes this narrative at once mythic and intimate. She illustrates a story the way one might imagine it taking place. She illustrates the prosaic detail of the woman making a snow angel. She undresses – not in a theatrical manner, but as one would undress before bed, privately, at the same time folding clothes and putting them away. As spectators and voyeurs we lean over the table on which this story is played out for us, shifting our attention from left to right and back again, from the mythic narrative on the left to the physical detail – “what it known” – the discovery of a body, her neatly folded clothes, and the cold hard ground which has become the theatre for this final sleep.

As a eight year old child in Halifax, the report of the discovery of the body of a naked woman in a nearby wood lot profound impact on Phillips. Decades later she researched the unexplained death of Joyce Belliveau, a woman who, according to some accounts, was “known to take off her clothes.” Like Phillips’s protagonist in It’s about how people judge appearance, her mythic heroine in Ecstasy is pushed (or pushes) to the edge of her existence, the place where life and its absence are closest. If the former work makes reference to clinical self-inflicted violence and masochism, the latter is less clear. Is Joyce Belliveau the author of her demise, or a victim? Was her walk in the snow as Phillips imagined it, or is this just a convenient fiction fabricated to make a terrible reality comprehensible? Marginalised, dislocated, dispossessed, Phillips’s heroine is, perhaps, a woman who, abandoned by the world, simply returned to the earth.

            O Mother of the Universe,

            this child is terrified by your naked truth,

            your unthinkable blackness, your sheer infinity.

            Please cover your reality with a gentle veil.[4]

* * *

“It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’.”[5]

Windows, picture frames and video screens are portals between physical and psychic spaces. We look through windows to connect to other worlds. As a literary convention, the view from the window can establish the space for the first person narration of the memory of another time and place, or of a dream. So it is that Paulette Phillips’s video projection, The Floating House (2002), begins with the view of a bay as if one were looking out a kitchen window. Across the water, on a drizzly overcast day, a small clapboard house with a brand new cedar-shingled roof drifts into view. It passes in and out of the picture frame in a series of edits – sometimes closer, sometimes further away. A droning cymbal and voices – children and adults – and the chirping and squawking and barking of animals accompany the house on its voyage.

The image of the floating house engages two large metaphors of feeling. Houses, frequently the subject of children’s art, are often understood as a representation of the self. The representation of the house – its structure, functionality and stability – may be an indication of a fragmented or integrated personality and may reveal feelings of well being or fears of loss, exposure or dysfunction. Water can mean many things, but it is often symbolized as either a source of life or its all-consuming opposite – deep, dark and unfathomable nature. Water can trigger deep fears of engulfment, submersion and drowning. In Phillips’s work, water clearly plays both roles. A house floating on the water is both a dream and a disaster. It is a dream of freedom, of disembodiment – to float buoyantly, aimlessly, to be part of the world, to be in the world, but detached and above it at the same time. Rootless, adrift, the floating house is the ego in full flight from necessity, a meditative state perhaps, like that of a dervish, a feeling of eternity, like Rolland’s “oceanic” state to which Sigmund Freud makes reference.[6]

The house comes into closer focus and we can observe the details in the windows. The window coverings move in the wind in a ghostly fashion, as though someone is pulling them aside to look out, and we scour the windows anxiously for signs of life. The sound track suggests the sounds of a family life that may have once fill this home. The building lists forward perilously, as the water reaches up to the bottom of the window sash. The camera tracks around the structure and the gentle bobbing feeling gives way to a slow but powerful spinning. The water appears choppier, darker, menacing, and the windows begin to fill with water.

In the first part of the video, the house gently bobs across the bay. There is something magical and slightly absurd about this house that is cut loose from its foundations to be carried by the current. Quickly, however, the aimlessly drifting house appears to be have been sucked into a whirlpool. The water changes from buoyant and supporting to ravaging and consuming.

The absurdity of a house floating languidly in a bay calls to mind the similar, strangely beautiful absurdity of the woman in Ecstasy who removes her clothes to lie naked in the snow. Like the way we unconsciously touched our hand to our foreheads after watching It’s about how people judge appearance, we root for the little house, identify with it – feel a sinking feeling as we watch it fill up with water and discharge its human artifacts to float on the surface. It seems only natural to identify with it as a container of human feeling.

But for a brief moment all logic is suspended and we imagine that these things are not only possible, but also desirable. We are children again. We can cut loose our ties to the earth and drift away. We can shed our clothes and play naked in the snow. Then we are seized as Phillips’s protagonists are engulfed by their fate. We are consumed by their demise the way we are transfixed by any disaster, no matter where it takes place. We watch, not because we love to, but because we feel we must. We watch, because we are implicated as both conspirators and victims. We watch because we are part of this laboratory experiment. We watch because the creator and the destroyer demands it.

Is my Mother Kali really black?

People say Kali is black,

But my heart doesn't agree.

If She's black,

How can she light up the world?

Sometimes my Mother is white,

Sometimes yellow, blue, and red.

I cannot fathom Her.

My whole life has passed trying.

She is Matter,

Then Spirit,

Then complete Void.[7]

Gordon Hatt, 2004

Endnotes

---

[1]. Cf. Among others Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977, where it is suggested that a narrative is an ‘intransitive’ function, and that insofar as any meaning is to be made, it is made by the reader, not by the ‘author’.

[2]. Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1975. <http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/OurBloodIII.html>.

[3]. Kali is "The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses . . . It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali. But all this and it should not be forgotten is an image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction." Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, Nicolas Hays: 1993. <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/5229/kali/kali.html> and Rama Prasada, Devotional Songs: The Cult of Shakti, (1718-75), published in 1966 by Sinha Pub. Calcutta.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Sigmund Freud, citing his famous correspondence with Romain Rolland in Civilization and its Discontents, 1930. <http://www.freud.org.uk/religion6.html>.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Kamalakanta Bhattacharya (1769-1821).

That Obscure Object of Desire: A Group Exhibition of Visions of Delight, Fascination and Desire

"That Obscure Object of Desire" begins with the title of the 1977 Luis Bunuel film  the title being a point of departure for a collection of otherwise unrelated work. In Luis Bunuels film That Obscure Object of Desire, one man obsessively pursues the love of a young woman. The film is made strangely compelling by the fact that the director used two different and dissimilar women to play the leading role. In doing so, Bunuel generalized the object of his protagonist's love, making the focus of the film instead the character's obsessive behaviour and the shapeless and shifting identities of our objects of romantic longing.

It is said that the desire to connect goes back to the infant's separation from the mother's breast. From that grows a life-long search for love and the creation of a system of language and symbols to express that desire. Prose and poetry, music and art are inexact yet necessary means to evoke, however directly or obliquely, the goals of our longing. The works in this exhibition address fantasy, play, consumption, memory and mystery as identifiable characteristics of that obscure object of our desire.

Featuring work by Jane Adeney, Sara Angelucci, John Armstrong, Santo Barbieri, Dianne Bos, Gabrielle de Montmollin, Phil Delisle, Evergon, Lee Goreas, Catherine Heard, Clarissa Schmidt Inglis, Amelia Jimenez, Dan Kennedy, Anda Kubis, Kristiina Lahde, Bonnie Lewis, Joe Lima, Jennifer Linton, Gwen McGregor, Michael Morris, Lisa Neighbour, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Kris Rosar, Mona Shahid, Joanna Strong, Diana Thorneycroft, Philip Vanderwall, and Rhonda Weppler.

Exhibition runs from July 9 through August 14, 2004.