Column

Writer

Predecessors

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Helen Reed presents her text _Aerobic Justice_.

Aerobic Justice

Artist

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Inventory: Predecessors

High above the hordes of stupefied tourists that shuffle through the clouds of cannabis smoke on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, there is a vast and secret library. It is the home of over seven thousand books reflecting decades of passionate scholarship and collecting by University of Amsterdam professors Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves. The couple’s private collection spreads across some twenty bookshelves, ranging from little glass cabinets to massive wall installations dominating their spacious, plant-filled apartment, hidden from the Red Light District’s culture of display. 

The library’s topics are as broad as they are specific: the Marquis de Sade and his legacy; sexual liberation movements; masturbation, male prostitution, and the intersection between sex and crime. There are a few books on werewolves. There is a shelf devoted to child sexuality and intergenerational love. They have first edition copies of the earliest German sexology books. A section on homosexuality in the Muslim world. Every issue of _BUTT_ magazine. Hundreds of biographies of queer historical figures. 

My new artwork is an audio guide of this library, and I am looking for a clue. I need something to guide me through this forest’s worth of paper, some mode of portraying the attributes of this trove of published material. 

A book opens, revealing an ex libris bookplate on the inside cover. It was a gift from Mattias to celebrate the completion of Gert’s PhD in 1987\. The illustrator Pam Georg Rueter was commissioned to carve a woodcut for the bookplate: an image of two naked youths, encircled by the utopian lyric, _The World Will Always Welcome Lovers_. 

The bookplate is not glued into every publication in the library. I come across it by chance, here and there. I find it in a book from 1964 called Greek Love; in a collection of essays by Esther Newton that includes “The Myth of the Mannish Lesbian”; in a 1908 sexology classic by Edward Carpenter entitled _The Intermediate Sex_, that warns, 

> _So commonplace is it to misunderstand, so easy to misrepresent._

The bookplate is inside _Nat iedereen behoort te weten omtrent Uranisme_, a slim turn-of-the-century volume about the nascent attitude that homosexuals – or rather, Uranians – were humankind’s next evolutionary stage. The pamphlet carries a second label, revealing a former owner, Jacob Shorer, whose Amsterdam library of gay material was confiscated during the Nazi occupation of Holland, never again to be recovered. How did this book find its way into Hekma’s keeping? 

Now it appears in a copy of _The Young and the Evil_, a story from 1933 written by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Gert pulled it out for me from a bookshelf in the bedroom. I hadn’t found it myself because the Ds, Es and Fs on the gay fiction shelves are arranged in a second row hidden behind the As, Bs and Cs. 

I had never heard of Ford, but was enchanted by an interview I found in _Gay Sunshine Interviews Vol. 1_. Ford chats casually about his enviable Paris set, about meeting surrealist René Crevel at Gertude Stein’s home; about Edith Sitwell introducing him to the great love of his life, painter Pavel Tchelitchew; about Hemingway’s homophobia and big feet. He conjures an image of Djuna Barnes in a Tangiers of yesteryear: 

> _She had finished Nightwood and I was typing it for her. I found a home in the Casbah, and Djuna came down from Paris and lived with me there and our daily routine was that I would go to the beach in the morning, come back and have lunch, type in the afternoon. I don’t know if I finished the book before she went back to Paris or not._

_Gay Sunshine Interviews Vol. 1_ is kept in a cabinet of books above the toilet, a section devoted to anthologies, including one called _Orgasms of Light_, where I find a poem by Ford. A line stands out: 

> _Writing comes out like a perfume to attract no one there is no one to attract_

Both anthologies are published by Winston Leyland, whose name surfaces repeatedly throughout the library. His influence is extensive and diverse: he is the publisher of a book about consensuality in sadomasochism called _The Kiss of the Whip_; he is the editor of a book of gay Latin American fiction entitled _My Deep Dark Pain Is Love_; he is thanked in the translator’s note of a collection of homoerotic poetry by the 8th-century Persian poet Abū Nuwās. 

> _Submit, drink from his hand that boy so generous with his slenderness a gazelle, as if Allah had dressed him in mother-of-pearl fawn-hide_

Opening another book, a typed letter addressed to Hekma falls out, written by Leyland himself. He is searching for an apartment in Amsterdam. He is working on a Dutch translation of Verlaine. He signs off _yours in affectionate comradeship in gay liberation, Winston_. 

It is not the only personal letter folded inside book pages that I find. There is one written to Duyves by the late Dutch composer Peter Schad, expressing his enthusiastic distaste for a certain gay composer’s first symphony. 

Could I design a narrative around the books in the library that bear Hekma’s ex libris bookplate? Or perhaps Leyland’s touch could act as a cue; he could play a leading role as I navigate this vast cast of interconnected characters. A hunt for books with personal letters inside? Each approach is as appealing as it is arbitrary. Whatever methodology emerges, I know my portrait of the library must be unofficial in nature. There has to be something illicit about my approach, something oblique and bibliomantic. Something queer . 

I don’t want to browse through Duvyes and Hekma’s collection like a dilettante, tumbling with the distracted drift of an Internet surfer. But for now, flânerie seems the only sensible approach of wading my way into the library, so I surrender to the labyrinth, looking for hints, sniffing spines for the perfume of writing that comes out to attract no one. 

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Sexuality

Sound

Documentary

This issue of Artefact follows the development of author Benny Nemerofsky’s latest artwork – an audio guide of University of Amsterdam Professors Gert Hemka and Mattais Duyves’ literary collection which covers topics related to sexuality, queerness, prostitution and sexual liberation among others. The article describes some of Nemerofsky’s findings as well as his approach to documenting the collection which spans continents and centuries.

Artefact: The World Will Always Welcome Lovers

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MOCA Toronto Sept

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Art Museum Sep 1

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Walter Phillips

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Editorial

Typically a predecessor is someone who has held a position one now holds or aspires to hold. It can describe an identity that is held in place by a set of social conventions or institutional roles, such as the Director of a gallery or the Editor of a magazine, as well as the continuation of a lineage, where one uses the materials and ideas of others as part of their own practice. By making predecessors the theme of this issue, we pose the question of what are the structures that allow there to be predecessors and also consider how we might expose and transcend these forms. To do so, we look to people who exist outside the parameters of social conventions, as well as to innovative individuals who rise above the norm and transform the institutions they work within. 

Many of the contributors to this issue invoke a dialogue with the teachers, friends, lovers, collaborators, surrogate parents and weird elders who have enriched and influenced their imaginations and careers. For a special section of the magazine, we asked some of our contributors to each write a short text about someone who has shaped their life and work. Sixteen writers have written about individuals from the art world and from culture at large, describing a wide range of influences – some less likely than others – who belong to a critical counterculture that shapes and informs much contemporary art practice. 

In this issue we also explore some of the larger stakes at play when we think about who are our predecessors. Several writers examine how both writing and art practice can support marginalized forms of knowledge and give voice to experiences that have been excluded. Métis anthropologist and critic Zoe Todd draws upon Indigenous legal theory to provide a critique of the use of Eurocentric philosophical concepts in contemporary art discourse. One of the latent ideas in Todd’s essay is that predecessors, and ideas themselves, are tied to the embodied specificity of places and cultural experiences, challenging the hegemony of abstract universal concepts produced within academic disciplines and institutions. Similarly, Maiko Tanaka, in her article on feminist citation, looks at strategic ways of putting other voices forward, such as using one’s position as a proxy for another. She describes citation as a durational exchange, where a written text is a bridge between lived experiences, which I might also argue, invokes the possibility of empathic connection and forms of community. 

Also in this issue, Liz Park writes about the artist and dedicated long-time member of the Vancouver art community Cornelia Wyngaarden, whose video and installation work uncovers neglected histories, connecting ancient myth with contemporary socio-political realities. Wyngaarden’s work, according to Park, describes feminist subjectivities that are both plural and trans-temporal. Similarly, Jesse McKee writes about film and video documents from the American counterculture of the late ’60s and early ’70s, looking at how these movements came to reject the idea of singular leadership and produced a model of dispersed engagement. McKee also examines Adrian Piper’s _Mythic Being Cycle_, an artwork from 1975 that included performances where Piper dressed as a young, racially ambiguous male, wore an afro wig and sunglasses and smoked a Tiparillo,making appearances at art openings, movie theatres and other public places where she droned phrases from the journal she has kept since pre-adolescence. McKee aligns this artwork with a general countercultural shift towards a consideration of the self and identity. Describing this performance as a form of revolutionary drag, McKee argues that the movements of the ’60s and ’70s produced a sense of “radical selfhood” characterized by an enduring counterpositionality that continues to unfold with subsequent generations of artists. 

Elsewhere in this issue, predecessors are identified as written texts. For the artist project, Danielle St-Amour and Xenia Benivolski staged a formal experiment, presenting a third edition of _Rearviews_, a project where they publish reviews of exhibition reviews. Woven throughout the magazine’s regular reviews section, Rearviews begins with a review by Onyeka Igwe, of Jon Davies’ review of _Performatorium_, a festival of queer performance art held in Winnipeg. In turn, Amy Lam reviews Igwe’s review, and Tiziana La Melia reviews Lam’s review. Continuing for six sequential reviews, each text becomes increasingly abstracted from the content of the original, drawing attention to the conventions of the review form itself. By looking backwards, _Rearviews_ uses homage and lineage as the building blocks of a critical practice, providing an apt metaphor for this issue as a whole. 

As someone who works closely with artists and writers in my role as Editor of this magazine, I am often aware of the range of ways that people draw inspiration from and share commitments with dimensions of experience that lay outside of contemporary art. In conceiving this issue, we were interested exploring the myriad origins of peoples’ critical practices. Asking contributors to write about predecessors was a way of identifying contexts and relationships that aren’t always visible in the public presentation of artwork and art writing. In some instances, we asked people we might ordinarily think of as _our_ predecessors, who are _their_ predecessors? Through these exchanges, a dialogue takes place, and a complex scaffold around contemporary practices and ideas becomes visible. 

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

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Amish Morrell introduces the theme of “predecessors” for this issue. 

Editorial: Predecessors

Feature

Zoe Todd (Métis) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in the Treaty Six Area of Alberta, Canada. She writes about Indigeneity, art, architecture, decolonization and healing in urban contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in northern Canada. Her art practice incorporates writing, spoken word, beading, drawing and film to tell stories about being Métis on the Prairies. She is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and is a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar. In July 2015, she will take up a position as a Lecturer in Anthropology at Carleton University.

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Feminism

Video

Indigenous

Criticism

Indigenous writer and anthropologist Zoe Todd, discusses a feminist praxis by looking to her aunt, filmmaker Loretta Todd, and to theorist Val Napoleon in her piece Rethinking Aesthetics and Ontology through Indigenous Law. Both women enliven modes of story telling; oral histories then become modes of decolonization to locate law in stories of land.

Rethinking Aesthetics and Ontology through Indigenous Law: On the work of Val Napoleon and Loretta Todd

Jesse McKee is a curator and writer in Vancouver, where he works as Head of Strategy at 221A. Previously he was the Curator of Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and a curatorial resident with tranzit, Romania and Things that can happen, Hong Kong. 

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Canadian

Philosophy

Jesse Mckee’s feature essay looks at countercultures through a forum he organized at Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver), which includes Dollarton Pleasure Faire photographs, Buckminster Fuller, Videofreex. Mckee looks at leadership, or lack thereof in the proliferation of resistance movements with Howard Caygill’s On Resistance and Michael Hardt’s recent lecture The Leadership Problem on the democratization of structures in movements in the 60s and 70s. 

because he loved the people / served the people? Counterculture Positions, Inheritance and Leadership

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines as well as maintains an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and walking. Her art practice takes up themes of food and sustenance through performance, video and textual strategies. In the intersections of gender, art, science and technology, she investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Multidisciplinary artist **Vera Frenkel** is a Governor General’s Award and Gershon Iskowitz Prize laureate, currently re-creating as a website the September 2017 installation of her multi-channel Body Missing project inside the Altaussee salt mine where the Nazis stored looted art.

Amy Fung is a writer and organizer of multifarious exhibitions and events. She is Toronto-based, not raised. 

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator.

Kegan McFadden is a writer and independent curator whose research explores printed matter, recent histories and melancholy. McFadden’s curatorial investigation into magazines produced by artists in Canada during the 1990s, >em>Yesterday was Once Tomorrow (or, A Brick is a Tool)</em> will be hosted by The Banff Centre later this year.

Jamie Ross is a visual artist trained outside the university. Street song, protest masks, and gay separatisms feature in their current video projects emerging from stories of Queer sexual commons of the ’70s and ’80s.

David Senior is Senior Bibliographer at the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York.

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Sixteen writers each contribute to a collection of essays about an influential individual from the art world and culture at large.

Predecessors: Linda Rubin, Ruth Maleczech, Andrew James Paterson, Mary Daly, Albert Dumouchel and Yvonne Rainer, Queer Elders, Mary Anne Staniszewski and Mick Wilson, James McSwain, Red Burns George Sawchuk, Bill Murray, AA Bronson, May Cutler, Ivan Illic

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Gender

Liz Park’s feature essay Heroines is a close examination of video and installation works by Vancouver based artist Cornelia Wyngaarden. The works straddle myth, realism, and the symbolic by inserting the female body into narratives of Greek mythology. Park asserts that Wyngaarden’s works bring forward the viewer’s subjectivities, looking to feminist politics of gender roles and representation in history. 

Cornelia Wyngaarden: Heroines

Maiko Tanaka is an independent curator based in Toronto. She has held curatorial positions at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and InterAccess in Toronto as well as at Casco in Utrecht, Netherlands. She recently co-edited Casco’s The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook as well as Model Minority published by Gendai Gallery. Currently, Maiko is undertaking a research residency on science fiction feminisms at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. She also serves on the board and programming committee of Gendai as well as on the editorial advisory board of C Magazine.

A friend and I are in the middle of a year-long mail correspondence project. This monthly letter writing practice was suggested by her as a way to give concrete form to conversations we’ve been having about what kind of project we’d like to collaborate on. Through this process I’ve noticed that we carry into our letters something we do through email and in person: citing texts and projects that inspire or support us in one way or another. The texts we cite are responsive to previous letters we’ve written and they focus on sharing resources and supportive words for dealing with our different fears and struggles with writing.

There is one particular poem that my friend quoted in her letter from last December that struck me when I first read it. I think it demonstrates what is vital and politically potent about this practice of citation. The piece is from Claudia Rankine’s _Citizen: An American Lyric_, in which she describes subtle and aggressive encounters with racism from her own lived experiences as a black woman navigating public, personal and professional spaces. Here is the passage my friend had transcribed:

> \_When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term – John Henryism – for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.\_[^1]

In her letter, my friend cites this poem as giving shape to a specific process of language assimilation she put herself through as an immigrant in Canada. But it also exposes the effects of erasure and stress that these experiences have on the body over time, impacting its capacity to perform and carry on. For my friend, Rankine offers words that confront and address her in a way that simultaneously invokes ache, joy and power.

In an academic context, the purpose of citation is to acknowledge sources and ideas often attributed to authority figures and seminal texts. In the context of our letters, citation expands this practice in multiple directions outside of the academy. In our letters, we acknowledge the source of our prose and situate its significance. But in my letters, I also acknowledge the reader – my friend – which in turn opens up the potential to situate the reader’s own experiences as also being significant. But this is not just about seeing one’s personal experiences “represented.” In her letter, my friend also expressed the desire to share Rankine’s work with friends and colleagues, pointing to the potential for building up a collective dialogue around how racism feels through the body for those who experience it, experience it differently or don’t experience it at all. This act of turning a personal source of empowerment into collective agency is something I have learned is a legacy of feminist pedagogies for collective empowerment and transformational change.

In her 1991 text “Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production,” feminist theorist Katie King addresses the race and genderblind spots of the academic field of bibliography studies from a feminist perspective.[^2] She describes a US-wide workshop from the late 1970s developed by Lenore Hoffman, which had students initiate collective research into women’s literature from regional contexts. One of these workshops had students going door to door in their local neighbourhoods, asking residents which women in the area were writing poetry. King sees this as using feminist pedagogy to de-centre the academy as the legitimizing apparatus of bibliographical knowledge by empowering students to experiment with research. Following King, a critical feminist bibliographic practice asks what and for whom are we invested in when we cite, what do we consider having value, and what kinds of new research can be produced? King implicates the researcher as a political agent, writing that “Stories about the production of stories require feminists to engage in this story-making, not merely to analyze it – there are no innocent positions from which one can only look on.”[^2] She thus stages an epistemological shift by asserting that the practice of bibliographic assembly cannot happen from an analytical distance and that researchers must acknowledge themselves as actively involved in the production of texts, histories, disciplines and communities.

In its Spring 2013 issue, this magazine published an artist project called _FAGing it Forward_, produced by the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG).[^3] This project enacted a participatory platform for citation aimed at making visible the lineages and legacies of inspiration and support that make up a feminist art community. A four-page spread displayed photographs of over 250 nametags stuck to the walls of the gallery, living room and kitchen, each tag presenting two names: the person attending an event at the FAG and the name of a feminist the attendee wished to acknowledge. Artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell (founders of the Feminist Art Gallery) describe how this works:

> \_When you come to the FAG, we ask you to make a nametag: first, with your name – so we can all know who each other is – and second, with the name of a feminist/queer/politicized artist, poet, rock star, writer, friend, inspiration, mentor, matron or lover – someone you want to make visible, someone you want everyone to know about… It’s how we tell each other about the people who matter to us. It’s how we build a community not restricted by money, geography or proximity.”\_[^3]

Citation here is not only an acknowledgment of sources of inspiration, but also realizes the community it references, performatively bringing it into being. _FAGing it Forward_ accounts for the various ways a community of women artists regenerates itself and thrives. In their 2006 book _A Postcapitalist Politics_, J.K. Gibson-Graham[^4] analyze case studies from the Philippines, the United States and Australia that they identify as exemplary of the building of “community economies.” In doing so, they propose a re-thinking of economy, from something that is highly structured and deterministic to a “contingent space of recognition and negotiation” that can only happen through accounting for the social interdependencies that support their subsistence and prosperity.[^5] Contrasted with a star-powered art world that thrives on exclusivity and celebrates individualized virtuosity, these ideas resemble _FAGing it Forward_ in the way they consider an ethical practice of exchange through citing unrecognized forms of sharing, labour and support. The walls of the gallery/kitchen/living room – and the ongoing conversations that take place through the events in the space (from the “party, potluck, angry letter writing frenzy, free-schooling, cat petting, the backyard screening, directed reading, protest sign making, incantation, or herbal tea and gluten-free muffin top artist talks”[^6]) – are entangled and driven by a politics and ethics of feminist forms of relation and support. This kind of practice is not just a utopian exercise. The urgency is in articulating and enacting the recognition of different values outside of deterministic relations and divisions of labour reproduced from this art world – an art world that parallels capitalist logic. _FAGing it Forward_ emphasizes citation as a living methodology.

In 2006, in New York, during an intensive on art and social engagement at The Kitchen in which I participated in, Lauren MacDonald, an Atlanta-based artist, and fellow intensive participant, created a powerful moment of citation that I will never forget. Her action was prompted by an equally powerful proposition from Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, who was the guest lecturer that day. The big news at that time was the Israeli bombings in Lebanon. Jacir had printed out dozens of emails that had arrived in her inbox that week from friends and acquaintances describing what was happening on the ground during the bombings. She passed out a different printed email to each of us in the program and asked us to work with it as material for a socially engaged artistic response in the commercial art gallery district of Chelsea where The Kitchen is located.[^7] For her response, MacDonald excerpted a line from the email she had been issued: “Last night was probably the most frightful night I have ever experienced in my whole entire life,” and handwrote it in sidewalk chalk across the exteriors of buildings in the centre of Chelsea. At the bottom of the quote, she provided a link to the author’s blog for any passersby and Chelsea residents whose curiosities were piqued about what the sentence is referring to.[^8]

What struck me was how this citation put seemingly remote events into proximity, bringing the lived experience of war to places where people may not have any idea of what was happening. During the process of editing this piece, my friend Nicole Liao pointed out what makes this a novel and critical use of citation: “Conventionally, citation bridges texts and ideas, to provide proof, lineage or authority to an argument or statement…This use of citation by Jacir is great because citation here is used as a means to bridge physical and virtual space, not to mention the radically disjointed experiences in time and space (for example, we are both occupying the same present, yet your present is traumatic while mine is not)”. Jacir and MacDonald cite the firsthand experiences of war as proof or authority of the US-backed bombings that were otherwise supressed by American mainstream media and expand the possibility of using citation to legitimize embodied, personal and political experiences. This furthers the idea of citations as sources and sites for further engaged responses, actions and other forms of dissemination in urgency. The simple but contentious act of Jacir spreading these emails treads the lines between text, oral history and lived experience, which opens up new possibilities for how felt experiences might creep into political consciousness in clandestine ways. The event still stays with me today, almost a decade later.

I’ve since gone back to Rankine’s quotation many times, and each time I read it I see new nuances in its details and the context it’s quoted within. Sometimes I even realize I’ve completely misread a word due to my friend’s nearly illegible handwriting. This particular act of citation functions not merely as providing the source of an idea or paying due to its author, but is specific to the situation it brings into being, from the time and place of its writing by the original author to the time and place of its quotation in the letter by my friend. It’s also specific to what I was doing and thinking as the reader, as well as the thing that prompts me to search for the letter so I can read it again. And it’s specific to the time in our lives when the words of wisdom from the shared text are nourishing and vital for both of us. The words from the quote and the ways it is set up by my friend cannot be separated. Together they make up an entangled source of wisdom and support, performed as a resource for the future. It is also specific to the durational form of exchange[^9] we have set up for ourselves, creating the possibility of enriching our understanding over the long run. It is something felt, lived and particular.

[^1]: Excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s _Citizen: An American Lyric_ (Graywolf Press, 2014). Transcribed from my friend’s letter.
[^2]: Katie King, “Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production,” _TEXT 5: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship_ (1991): pp. 91–103.
[^3]: Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, “FAGing it Forward”, _C Magazine 117_ (2013): p. 10.
[^4]: J.K. Gibson Graham is the pen name for feminist post-structuralist geographers Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham.
[^5]: J.K. Gibson Graham, A Post-capitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 165–167
[^6]: Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, “FAGing it Forward, Toronto”, _C Magazine 117_ (2013): p.10.
[^7]: An account of the assignment in Jacir’s own words can be found at http://electronicintifada.net/content/ali-la-pointe-and-zenas-words-new-york-streets/62428 
[^8]: The original blog post is here: http://www.beirutupdate.blogspot.ca/2006\_07\_01\_archive.html
[^9]: Special thanks to Nasrin Himada for allowing me to share this instance of our letter-writing project for this article.

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Relational art

This feature essay by Maiko Tanaka looks at feminist practices of citation through Alyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue’s Faging it Forward, and a project between Lauren MacDonald and Emily Jacir. Addressing the collaborative and supportive nature of art practices, these projects shift authorship through the event of reception as performative and temporal action.

Feminist Approaches to Citation

Designer

Publisher

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Assistant Editor

Artist Project

**Xenia Benivolski** is a writer and curator currently based in Toronto.

Danielle St-Amour curates, writes and makes work in and around Canada. She is currently curator in residence at SBC Gallery in Montreal.

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_Rearviews_ is a publication project co-organized by Xenia Benivolski and Danielle St-Amour.

Rearviews: With Onyeka Igwe, Amy Lam, Tiziana La Melia, Raymond Boisjoly, Oliver Husain and Mohammad Salemy

Review

Jon Davies is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

Taking place in the middle of a Prairie winter, the 2015 Performatorium festival’s theme of “Making It, Difficult” held the promise of buckets of blood staining the Regina snow red. In fact, it was much warmer that weekend than anyone could have anticipated – a balmy 2 degrees – and while some of the performances that unfolded could be called “difficult” in terms of their intensity, duration or content, the word aptly described many pressing off-stage realities as well. The economic precarity of sustaining oneself as a performing artist, the struggle not only to communicate but also to claim and articulate one’s place in history – these things are difficult. Difficult people, difficult choices, difficult situations – but difficult to whom, and why? 

Curated each year by founder Gary Varro, Performatorium 2015 cultivated intimacy: all events took place in close proximity and the schedule was structured around mid-day talks followed by evenings of multiple performances at the Neutral Ground gallery and the Artesian performance space, a former church. Gathering a small group of performance artists together for three days established a provisional community, where something resembling a shared language connected artists with very different approaches, contexts, aesthetics and reference points. 

Legendary Los Angeles-based artist Ron Athey magnanimously reigned over the weekend. Athey’s oeuvre is the history of AIDS written on the body, from a time where everyone he knew was dying, to settling into the so-called Lazarus syndrome, where those destined to die unexpectedly keep surviving and have to deal with the difficulties of simply living. I have been following Athey’s work since the late 1990s, and images of his highly theatrical performances – drawing on the forms of evangelical ritual, and on the physical violation and transformation of his and his friends’ bodies – are etched in my mind. Athey’s example is profound and far-reaching, from his influence on fellow festival performers Kris Grey and Martin O’Brien, to his close working relationship with academics like Jennifer Doyle of the University of California, Riverside, who places Athey squarely at the centre of her indispensable 2013 study _Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art_. Athey’s politics of refusal has historically cast him out of contemporary art discourse, but in his radical rigour, he is central to any feminist, queer, subcultural and embodied history of recent art. In an artist talk at the University of Regina, Athey set the stakes high: how do you push through questions of identity and representation, and actually manifest a phenomenon that “changes the room”? 

Athey’s presence was also key to Performatorium’s embrace of lineage and influence as means for queer and trans survival, an aspect that J.J. Kegan McFadden highlighted in his _Canadian Art_ review of last year’s festival. Athey named Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Johanna Went (among many others) as touchstones, while New York-based Anya Liftig invoked William Wegman and Gilda Radner. Once we “burn the family” as Athey nicely put it, to whom do we turn to keep us going and perhaps even understand what we are striving for? I tend to romanticize the kinship structures that cohere even the most toxic art/subcultural scenes, so I found Athey’s “extended family” model of long-term collaboration in work and in life very moving, but artists like Liftig and Regina-based duo Homo Monstrous reminded me that relationships with one’s peers can often be more agonistic, and not in a fruitful way. If Athey was Performatorium’s godhead than Homo Monstrous (Leo Keiser and Jaye Kovach) was its heart. Behind the scenes, Keiser and Kovach ran the festival’s technical operations at the university and Neutral Ground, respectively, working closely with their fellow performers on their pieces. Their performance, _How Fucking Loud Do I Have to Yell?_, was harrowing, particularly as an outsider watching them here on their home turf, where the toll of day-to-day survival in a hard, isolated city was palpable. In a cover story in Regina’s alt-weekly,_Prairie Dog_, Kovach noted, “being on the trans female side of the spectrum… you’re in a situation where you’re almost always performing. People look at you and have questions, so it’s way more of a production than it needs to be, as far as just existing goes.” Homo Monstrous blasted the room with trans rage, with Keiser hunched on the floor among the audience – shoulder blades jutting – screaming “I’m going to lose my fucking voice” over Kovach’s righteous noise until the prophesized damage was done. Keiser and Kovach’s wall of noise drowned out their words, the droning sound physically occupying the gallery. 

New York-based artist Grey’s _Homage_ saw him standing on a low, stage-like plinth with a calm smile, pierced by thick, four-inch-long needles in a horizontal line, following the scars of his breast removal surgery. His regular, sure breath acted as a kind of metronome. Then, one at a time, he removed the needles, causing blood to trace a line down his body, some pooling between his legs. After a dramatic pause, he dropped each needle. Grey’s stillness and formality suggested the creation of an iconic tableau, and in terms of image-making, I found myself disappointed when some of the punctures did not stream forth the highly aesthetic lines of blood on his white skin. Of course the body will do what the body wants, and therein lies the power of this kind of work, where outcomes and effects can’t be fully planned or predicted. At the artists’ roundtable (which I moderated), Grey spoke of orifices as sites of vulnerability: what comes in and goes out of our bodies is policed. He reverently articulated the potency and sense of agency found in giving oneself new holes. 

Toronto-based Jess Dobkin’s holes were more playful and vaudevillian than those punctured by many of her counterparts here. In Flowers, she anthropomorphized her vagina, dressing it up as a crude Neil Diamond to croon a duet of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” with Dobkin as Barbra Streisand. In _Dirty Plotz_, she gussied up her ass with a clownish face, forcing it to imbibe and then messily regurgitate the colours of the rainbow – producing an abject queer flag. Appropriately enough, this was all staged to a child’s YouTube version of the hit song “Let It Go” from _Frozen_, the animated Disney phenomenon deliriously adored by young girls (and some drag queens) the world over. Next to Grey’s stoic bloodshed – which can’t help but carry some bravado – I appreciated Dobkin’s comment in her artist talk (given largely to students) that her experience of giving birth consisted of as much screaming, fluids and altered states as the most “difficult” performances one could conceive. 

In _The Human Factor_, Liftig treated a fish like a lover – singing to it before the relationship soured and she destroyed it with a blender and guzzled down the chunks – and drew out the boiling alive of a lobster to its existentialist limits in _Consider the Lobster_. Here, Liftig’s slow, deliberate pace suggested an effort to commune with and even become the hapless crustacean before her; her movement exaggerated everyday gestures into a languorous _danse macabre_. Liftig’s tortured struggle – the gravitas that she brought to the decision to kill and eat her creaturely foil – effectively prolonged its life, postponing the inevitable as long as possible. 

In both performances, Liftig regarded the audience with a severe, defiant gaze. I found this potent sense of complicity I felt with the performers to be the most compelling part of the festival. This was often most pronounced when something did not appear to be going as it should, for example the malfunctioning blender and hot plate that Liftig required for her visceral trans-species experiments, or when a shard of spontaneously smashed electric guitar dinged Kovach in the forehead during their set. Athey’s closing performance of _Messianic Remains_ invited a heightened level of audience complicity as we were encouraged to walk up on stage to anoint Athey’s supine body – laid out on a rack of metal pipes, penetrated by a baseball bat – with a lubish gel. Communally, we rubbed his body down – an intensely intimate, tactile form of engagement. Our ministrations seemingly brought him to life as he sprang from the bed for the second part of his performance, an impish invocation of the great Divine from Jean Genet’s transgressive 1943 novel _Our Lady of the Flowers_. 

London-based O’Brien’s performance _Breathe for Me_ kept me riveted throughout its three-hour duration. Leaving the Artesian, even looking away from him, seemed like a betrayal: I had to breathe for him. I haughtily fancied myself an indispensable presence, whose moral support of just being there was required for O’Brien to get through the trials before him. (Conversely, I needed to witness him make it through to the end for my own sense of closure.) O’Brien has cystic fibrosis, which is characterized by the accumulation of excess amounts of thick mucus, causing intense coughing and difficulty breathing. O’Brien risks working in the shadow of the late Bob Flanagan, who produced performance-based work from his raw sublimation of CF pain into wild BDSM experimentation with partner Sheree Rose, wresting bodily agency back from the disease. Rather than eschewing this lineage, O’Brien embraces his corporeal connection to Flanagan; he arrived in Regina from a residency at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, where he had been collaborating closely with Rose while going through her archive. 

_Breathe for Me_ consisted of a series of repeated, ritualistic actions akin to stations of the cross drawn from O’Brien’s experience of CF. He began by using a scalpel to carve the imagined outlines of his lungs into the skin of his chest. He then crawled down a white plastic “runway” to a kind of pillow-altar where he lay down, breathed deeply and rhythmically beat his chest (smearing the blood from the cuts in the process) to loosen the phlegm from his respiratory system, before crawling over to one of many specimen containers flanking the runway. Expelling the sputum into the first container, he crawled back to the altar and started the painful process again. After expectorating into all 30 containers, O’Brien repeated a number of other actions a grueling 30 times each. Skinny knees on wood floor, his crawling was clearly torturous – and O’Brien soon resembled an arthritic dog, even carrying objects in his jaws. The repeated actions culminated in a debilitating march back and forth down the runway with a rubber hood over his head, which both blinded him and limited his breathing even further. O’Brien had to feel his way down the runway to get to the other side before oxygen ran out – he struggled and tripped, occasionally moaning in agony. The performance developed with a sense of inevitability; by repeating each action a set number of times, we count down along with him, while fully grasping how much was left. The end of the performance was extraordinary as O’Brien crawled down the runway once more to open the specimen containers. With each, he dug out the phlegm with his fingers and sexily anointed his body with it; he became a true diva here, playing with the goo, rubbing it in like lotion, even tossing it over his shoulder as if it were a jaunty scarf. By the very end, O’Brien was filthy and exhausted, retiring to his alter in a spent heap. The once-pristine set was now a battlefield strewn with medical refuse, splashed with slime. Like a scene from Caligula, O’Brien struck the pose of an orgy-exhausted emperor as he regained his breath sprawled before us. It was time to exit. 

During _Breathe for Me_, I appreciated that O’Brien was not always “on” or “in the zone.” Dressed simply in a loose jockstrap, his performance persona was workmanlike, and he took breaks from his torments to drink water and eat a snack. He looked up at people who walked in and out, didn’t attempt to stifle any of his unscripted gasps or groans, and stretched his limbs when needed. As with the other artists, I had the opportunity to socialize with O’Brien over the weekend, to share meals and drinks, walks and taxi rides. This proximity further complicated and nuanced the collapse of “self” and “artwork” that occurs in these performances. Spending time with these human beings both “on” and “off,” thinking about difficulty in all its forms – from the most mundane tribulations to the headiest challenges of existence – helped me consider how, here and now, performance rooted in discomfort and duress can forge new aesthetic and affective possibilities. 

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Jon Davies reviews _Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance_ held at Regina, Saskatchewan. (January 22-24, 2015). 

Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance

Kyra Kordoski’s art writing and photo documentation have been featured in periodicals including esse arts + opinions, _White Fungus, BOMB, Inuit Art Quarterly,_ CBC, and _The Globe and Mail._ She completed an MA, Cultural Studies from University of Leeds and an MFA, Art Writing from Goldsmith’s College, University of London.

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Kyra Kordoski reviews Myfanway MacLeod’s exhibition _Tell Her Nothing She Tells All_ shown at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver. (March 21-May 2, 2015).

Myfanwy MacLeod: Tell Her Nothing She Tells All

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Jessica Evans reviews Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s exhibition _Following the Ten Commandments_ shown at School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. (Nov 13, 2014 – Feb 20, 2015).

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Following the Ten Commandments

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Pearl Van Geest reviews the traveling exhibition _Possible Futures: What is to be done?_ (Oct 4, 2014 – Jan 11, 2015). 

Possible Futures: What is to be Done?

Yaniya Lee is an arts writer based in Toronto.

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Yaniya Lee reviews Krista Belle Stewart’s _Seraphine, Seraphine_ shown at Mercer Union, Toronto. (March 13 – April 25, 2015). 

Krista Belle Stewart: Seraphine, Seraphine

**Karina Irvine** is a writer based in Vancouver.

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Karine Irvine reviews Krista Buecking’s exhibition _MATTERS OF FACT_ shown at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto. (Feb 26 – April 4, 2015). 

Krista Buecking: MATTERS OF FACT

Ben Portis is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

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Ben Portis reviews _TEMPERMENTAL_ shown at Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto. (Jan 5 – Feb 14, 2015). 

TEMPERAMENTAL

Henry Adam Svec is a writer and scholar who is moving to Jackson, Mississippi.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” as Oscar Wilde put it, “for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”[^1] Eleanor King’s recent exhibition, _Dark Utopian_, scours maps and diagrams of various scales for a better place that does not exist. Whether or not this interdisciplinary assemblage denotes a route to utopia, however, is a provocatively open question. Rather than offering legible instructions to paradise, King sets the viewer adrift across the smooth spaces of modernity, forcing us to reckon not only with an “impossible” destination, but also with the murky desires that might drive us there.

The main room of the exhibition is dominated by a massive wall painting, _Deepwater Horizon (BP)_, whose vibrant hues and stunning stripes reach from floor to ceiling and around the gallery’s winding walls. King has taken a standard cartographic view of the coastline, from Halifax to New York City, and exploded it with cool colours and angular contours – a bird’s eye representation washing out into abstract, mechanical patterning. It is an exhilarating image. The dazzle painting style to which she alludes was used by the British to disguise ships during the First World War (it also found its way into paintings by NSCAD president and Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer); but King’s gesture highlights contemporary reverberations of this colonial heritage, too, for both sea and land – and art – have become prime real estate. Indeed, from the point of view of corporations like British Petroleum, the whole world is a site of value extraction, what Martin Heidegger has called a “standing reserve,” just waiting to be called to productive action.[^2] Is King’s dazzle camouflage a defensive manoeuvre, then, an attempt to conceal both the map’s territory (and the map) from the hungry gaze of capitalists and speculators?

Extending the nautical and navigational themes is the sculpture _Rafts_. Two small punts lie in the middle of the gallery floor – the rickety vessels seemingly engaged in a vaguely sexual coupling, soft blue mounted onto faded yellow. As with the wall map, there is a medium-specific attention to materiality in the visually pleasing and playful work, arresting given its gothic minimalism. Yet, these found objects also introduce the question of political-aesthetic translation. Are such beautiful and cleverly positioned things to be desired or consumed? (Not owned, one would presume, since they are listed as materials only “borrowed” from actor John Dunsworth.) Or, are we meant to wonder about their usefulness as actual tools for survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? King has us scuttling between the gallery, the coastal province of Nova Scotia and the ideal society.

The other works in the main room focus more on aesthetics than pragmatics. _Wormholes VI, VII, VIII_ are large drawings on paper that have been imposed onto the wall painting like digital pop-up windows. With coloured pencils, King has repeatedly traced the shape of the Compact Disc and the vinyl LP to burrow winding, cascading paths, which bump into one another but do not manage to connect. In a similar vein, the sculpture _CD Worm_ is a stack of old CDs shaped into a bent tower – like a creature reaching up for rain. There is a less obvious connection between these meditations on the materiality of sonic media and the show as a whole, but conceptually they continue to riff on the themes of drive, utility and despair. It is as though King’s quest for utopia continues, but here in distinct media and forms rather than in geographical locations.

In the title work _Dark Utopian_, a video and sound piece that plays in a second room, we perhaps get the clearest articulation of the artist’s political vision. Via a recording of a Google Earth tour, we float slowly down the coastline (facing the land, not the sea), from Halifax to New York City and then back again. It is an eerily claustrophobic, lonely ride. We are also treated to a didactic protest song of sorts, though far from the optimistic anthems of the folksingers of the mid-20th century. King herself sings plaintively, her voice echoing, her electric guitar ringing slow arpeggios: “We’re so confused / We have no clue / How to get out of the mess we’re in / Is there no light at the end?” The earnest and melancholy tune is played loud enough to float faintly through the entirety of the space, giving the whole show a frosty, quizzical glaze.

Theorists and artists alike have worked to reimagine utopia over the past decades. Utopia is not necessarily a rigid framework to be imposed onto society; according to Ruth Levitas, it is only “a desire for a better way of being.”[^3] As is suggested by the exhibit’s title, _Dark Utopian_ is not all sunshine and rainbows and relational aesthetics, and there is a decidedly void affective energy running through it. Yet, it is in King’s ambivalence and high-punk aesthetic that we see her utopianism’s potential. It is in between – along the cold channels of our global systems, like seaways and Google Earth and digital networks and even the institutions of contemporary art – that we find our dwelling places, and that is where we need to do the hard work of desiring to be better together, for now.

[^1]: Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Boston: J.W. Luce and Company, 1910).
[^2]: Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
[^3]: Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).

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Henry Adam Svec reviews Eleanor King’s _Dark Utopian_ shown at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia. (Jan 16 – June 14, 2015).

Eleanor King: Dark Utopian

Sabrina Tarasoff is a curator and writer based in Paris.

The 23,000-square-foot location that up until the late ’90s held the Guggenheim Museum’s gift shop in New York City’s Soho district could now be best described as an exhibition hall-cum-retail space-cum Mecca (at least for those who hold Miuccia Prada as God). Taken over by Prada as its flagship store in 2001, with none other than Rem Koolhaas leading its redesign, the space stretches through a full New York block, not so much as a corridor, but a wormhole to the future: with cylindrical glass elevators, dressing room walls that turn opaque at a simple touch, and a wave-shaped double staircase in zebrawood that extends the full length of the interior only to serve as a spot for trying on clog-heeled sandals and the like. It is – or was – contemporaneity itself, expressed in conspicuous architectural moves, with, as the late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp once suggested, “space as its ultimate luxury; space, and the dedication of so little room to stuff you can buy.”

While it would be speculative at best to assume that Eileen Quinlan paid any particular attention to the Prada flagship ordeal in her recent exhibition at Campoli Presti, it seems to stand as a viable example of the strategies of presentation that are disseminated in her work. The redefinition of Prada’s retail identity through pervasive winks to museum-like presentation, particularly considering the scarcity of products actually on display, puts into equal question the intertwinement of art and commerce – or rather, the subsumption of artistic practices into commercial environments. Quinlan’s exhibition, _Double Charlie_, inverts this hierarchy, as the economic propensity of a photograph – and its infinite reproducibility – is aired out. In a poignant art-world faux pas (but a faux pas nonetheless), _Double Charlie_ consists of 12 chromogenic prints, or, more specifically, two almost identical images installed in full editions of six (all 2015). Acknowledging this multiciplicity within the exhibition space asserts a very welcome attempt to remove some of the hush that surrounds the commercial aspects of artistic production. It’s a necessary breach of etiquette aimed at destabilizing the ever-present (mis)conception that art and commerce exist in separate realms. Quinlan’s photographs force an engagement with both sides: on the one hand, demystifying the art object from its mythic singularity by displaying full editions, and on the other, acquiescing to collector protocol by titling and presenting them as installation.

To engage in this strategy plainly would appear downright cynical, were it not for the artist’s rigidly intuitive process. The images themselves are mystical abstractions of something akin to leather bathed in a theatrically amber light. A soft and supple Prada bag, perhaps, staged as a still-life in an elusively ambiguous frame, waiting for the supposition of an opaque market slogan and a ritualized brand name to provide it with value. Of course, to give away too much would be vulgar or promiscuous; to give too little or too grudgingly, ineffective. Instead, Quinlan relies on a process based partly on rigidly self-imposed rules, and partly on strategic reflections on commercial photography. Though a full object is never displayed, it is hinted at through textures and curves, rendering it a ghost of its former self.

Though she has previously discussed the partial lack of meaning in her titles—using the names of obscure perfumes in order to alter a viewer’s perception of the work, without any real significance to the product per se – it is hard to consider these images without conjuring a parallel to the lingering powers of scents. Charlie, for example, was a successful perfume manufactured by Revlon, marketed in the mid-’80s with the confident, Annie Hall-esque Shelley Hack as its spokeswoman. Though there are surely ways of linking the perfume’s factual history to an ancillary discussion on marketing strategies, Quinlan’s use of Charlie as a title seems to be more about an emotive extraction. With the tensions of the Charlie Hebdo attacks still fresh in the spring air, the title is naturally evocative to a Parisian audience. The title infuses the work with a subsidiary meaning, in order to sway the viewer in a preferred direction through memory and emotion. It is a marketing strategy in itself, veiling the essence of the “product” in misleading and affective slogans – not unlike a darker version of Prada’s Candy: “with joie de vivre as a starting point for new ideas!”

If this was Quinlan’s intent with other similarly entitled series, such as _After Hours_ (currently on view at Campoli’s London space), _Double Charlie_, then, does not seem to be a disingenuous or tactical move. Rather, there is something touching about faintly dedicating the exhibition to the events of January past. Without delving into too much detail, it professes an ability to be vulnerable and real in spite of one’s artistic regime or outside expectations of emotionally void and impersonal practices. Quinlan extends herself and her own sentiments into the space and in return, the work gains the viewer’s trust.

Perhaps this navigation between disingenuity and sincerity in the art world and its mechanics is at the core of Quinlan’s explorations into studio photography. Prada may have Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron, the Dan Flavin-church-cum-grotto in suburban Milan, and both an artistic and philosophical history to legitimize its practices, yet it makes no pretense to exist outside of the market that sustains it – regardless of its impact. Art, on the other hand, operates largely under the illusory forcing of a market that has sought to maintain total opacity. At best, the systems of editioning and dissemination that have been devised – particularly for photography – are arbitrary, and purely intended to increase value through scarcity and elusiveness. In _Double Charlie_, Quinlan opens up a discourse in favour of transparency. She untangles art and commerce only to navigate the boundaries therein, and locate where photography, as a medium as well as an object, fits within the contemporary – and its markets. It is a realistic and inquisitive approach with room for hesitation, interjection and intuition.  
In the end, the “double” in _Double Charlie_ could refer to any number of things: the double edition, the double standards of the art world, or the illusion of specificity that doubles the value of objects. Whatever one’s take, the exhibition raises crucial questions regarding the interplay of value, display and objects in an age of luxury, while forgetting to acknowledge the complicated role of the photographic medium itself.

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Sabrina Tarasoff reviews Eileen Quinlan’s _Double Charlie_ shown at Campoli Presti, Paris. (March 21 – April 11, 2015). 

Eileen Quinlan: Double Charlie

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

In the spring, Badlands Unlimited, a publishing house founded by artist Paul Chan in 2010, released three new titles of erotic fiction in print and as e-books as part of a new series titled _New Lovers_. All volumes are written by previously unpublished authors and average about 120 pages. The first in the series, _How To Train Your Virgin_, by the pseudonymous Wednesday Black, takes place in a fictional landscape separated from our own by human dream space. Its queen is the book’s narrator.

There, physical laws depart from our own (the populace is immortal, and we see the bodies of its members slip mercurially between chosen and natural forms) but the organic elements that make up the book’s visual register are nonetheless recognizable: dogs, birds, eggs, trees, flowers, fields. There is a vine girl (“a willow tree made female flesh”) and a vine man (“a hoary chap with face almost entirely occluded by the vines that grow from his skin. His body is shaggy with tendrils and leaves, and at the base, the thick genitals are petrified erect”); a “Baby Garden” where trees bear “orbs made up of curled fetuses of all species—fairies and nixies and gnomes, winged piglets, bearded unicorns, toothpick-haired unicorns”; a ghost woman with a leopard’s head and an “athlete’s body” that’s “Amazonian in its hardness”; and a centaur, whose species is described as “loyal creatures, being made of the stallion’s lust and the man’s intelligence and deliberation.” And there are others. As you can imagine, these bodies are all introduced in order for them to have sex with each other. And remarkably, despite their radical structural deviation from human bodies, they somehow fall under the very human hegemony of penis-in-vagina, mutually orgasmic sex.

The novel’s plot is motivated by the narrator queen’s desire to sabotage an affair her husband, the king, is on course to pursue. The targets of his affection are two human virgins – one male, one female – and the queen tries desperately to reach them before he can, in order to take their respective virginities and, in turn, nullify their appeal. Normally, she can reach the humans during their dreamtime, though with M – the girl – her attempts are “stymied by tinctures for depression, anxiety, suffering,” which prevent uninvited nighttime visitors. Peter – the boy – “does not take pills of forgetfulness” but rather dreams nightly of his memories of an unplaced war zone where “rockets crash, women shriek under the rapine attention of beings of clotted ash and fury,” and this trauma keeps the queen at bay. However, she manages to reach the virgins when they are vulnerable – Peter when he is sick, M when under the influence of MDMA.

The prose is peppered with structural and lexical anachronisms in the vein of “I run from the Hall and through the moors to the borderlands where the Realm gives way to a sandy, bemisted void.” It has the same effect as listening to characters in fantasy movies and television shows set in ancient or alternative worlds who uniformly have British accents and a formal syntax: that someone is awkwardly trying to affect aristocratic class or status through their proximity to history and archaic usage. It seems that even in fantasy, there’s a limit to what can be imagined.

Lilith Wes’ _We Love Lucy_ is a bit more straightforward in its ambitions. On the night of her 30th birthday, a young woman plans to have dinner and then go to a club with her best friend Nicholas, a gay man with whom she shares an emotional connection so strong that she describes their meeting as “falling in love,” and his partner, James, who she assumes, by grace of his relationship to Nicholas, is gay. Instead they end up in a threesome, and the rest of the book is mostly dedicated to descriptions of them fucking in different permutations: first Nicholas and James while Lucy watches; then all three together; then James and Lucy; and lastly, all three again. The book ends – spoiler alert –in double penetration. “My heart ached,” Lucy narrates. “I’d never felt so full.”

James, Lucy discovers, is bisexual – a perfect bridge between her and Nicholas’ previously incompatible sexual desires. For Lucy it’s the fantasy MMF relationship she never knew she wanted: she’s able to act on the romantic dynamic of her mutually supportive partnership with her gay best friend, while being attracted to the alpha male confidence – including some mild domination – of James, an experienced lover of women. This book is the most conventional of the three. Typical to a lot of mainstream female-narrated romance and erotica, it contains, early on, a kind of tepid description of the protagonist’s body, by which readers are meant to understand that she’s hot even if she doesn’t see herself that way: “I checked my phone for the time. They should be here soon, I thought, heading to the bathroom for one last check on the hair. It was behaving; long and loose like I normally wear it, the soft brown end resting between my shoulder blades. The sheer black fitted blouse hugged my small breasts and tapered down over the ample hips that are my birthright.”

Just as the difference between the first and second books in the series was the second’s increased resemblance to actual lived sexual experience, the third book – even just the fact of it taking place in the art world and that its characters have realistically poor communications skills – is likely more identifiable for Badlands’ readership. In Andrea McGinty’s _God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name_, a female protagonist, Eve, an American artist freshly out of rehab, tours Europe in search of respite from professional and social pressures, time to devote to her studio practice, and dick. To find the latter, she uses Bangly, a smartphone app. While one might hope that Bangly could set into motion some previously unimagined potential for sexual-social media, it’s clearly just a fictional off-brand  
Tinder, facilitating sexts and hookups between globally triangulated, networked adults: “She was in thigh-high stockings, running down the streets of Vienna. She had a hookup app and a growing sense of self worth.”

There’s vaguely an overarching narrative but it’s mostly organized around a series of sexual conquests: we see Eve sleep with a Finnish curator in London; fly to Finland to participate in a remote artist’s residency outside of Espoo; travel to Helsinki to hook up with someone she met on Bangly; return to the residency to sleep with its director; take a teaching position in Munich; simultaneously fuck both a new Bangly stranger and the curator of a prominent Austrian Kunsthalle in one of its bathroom stalls; go to London with the intention of fucking the first Finnish curator only to ultimately reject him in a display of strength and self-knowledge; and then finally, have oral sex with someone she meets swimming in her London hotel’s rooftop pool while mumbling to herself the novel’s eponymous line.

Between hookups, the art-world specific elements of the narrative are by turns funny, as in Eve’s stream-of-consciousness insertions in the texts – “Are illusions worth having if they make you feel okay in the world?/Would he ever try anal?/Is sex different in Europe?/Why are men who are so good at eating pussy so bad at making coffee?/What the hell is speculative realism anyway?” – and kind of boring. Her “lowest point” is a “debilitating depression that led to erratic and self-destructive acts, like snorting coke off her gallery dealer’s cock. It wasn’t even a special occasion. It was a Tuesday.” Though this is maybe not inaccurate to the experience of certain players in the art world, it’s just too lame of a stereotype to merit parroting.

But stereotypes are endemic, and perhaps central, to mainstream erotica – sexual fantasy and a subject’s interiority do not make easy bedfellows when a text is meant to titillate rather than challenge, experiment or critique. And perhaps this is where the work of the _New Lovers_ series gets confusing. Chan cites Olympia Press, a Parisian imprint established in 1953, as a model for Badlands. Olympia published erotic pulp fiction in order to support more radical literary endeavours, including, famously, works by Burroughs, Becket, and Nabokov. And in this model, _New Lovers_, I guess, is meant to be the pulp. If the books aren’t transgressive, it’s because they’re not supposed to be. If they read like a lot of self-published erotica on the Internet, it’s by design.

Chan is quick to point out, too, that Badlands’ publishers are amateurs. In an interview with _ArtNews_, he says that “the nice thing about what we do is we have no idea what we’re doing” and “we thought we’d give it a go” and “we’re certainly not erotic-fiction editors” and “we don’t read erotic fiction, none of us did – I barely have time to read menus at this point.”[^1] Just as the New Lovers series sees these publishers producing works in a genre about which they know little, all three novels rely on elements of the unknown on which to focus their subjects’ desire – perhaps all sexual fantasy does to a certain extent. It’s most obvious in _How To Train Your Virgin_, where we witness sex between literal aliens; _We Love Lucy_ incorporates a straight female fetishization of gay male sex; and _God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name_ positions its protagonist as a sort of American sexual explorer on the Continent. While sex is necessarily a potent point from which to chart discrepancies between American and European cultures, one gets the impression that McGinty uses the word “Finnish” to mean either exotic or unknowable, or deploys it in constructions as maladroit as “He could no longer hold it back and erupted like a glorious Finnish geyser”… are there geysers in Finland? A quick Google search says no.

[^1]: Dan Duray, “The Art of Cunning: Paul Chan on Erotica, Ancient Greek, and his New Work”, in ArtNews (March 6, 2015). http://www.artnews. com/2015/03/06/paul-chan-on-erotica-ancient- greek-and-his-new-work/

issue-126-p68-70.pdf

Tess Edmonson reviews Wednesday Black’s book _How to Train your Virgin_, published by Badlands Unlimited. (2015).

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C Mag

Issue 126