Column

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer, academic and musician and a member of Alderville First Nation. Her novel, _Noopiming: A Cure For White Ladies_ will be released this September by House of Anansi Press.

Kinaak sits alone beside the marsh   
with just their mazinaabikiwebinigan   
and the sound of the odd car  
passing by at 70 km/hour.

Forty million years is a long time to live.   
Two hundred years of smashed   
carapaces is a lot to witness.  
A world is a heavy thing   
to carry on your back.

The moon travels farther than you think.

Kinaak sits alone beside the marsh   
with just their mazinaabikiwebinigan   
and the sound of the odd car  
passing by at 70 km/hour,   
and types one character   
per twenty-four hours.

S is first.

L comes on the second day.

O follows on the third day.

and finally, W.

On the fifth day, Kinaak pulls the page out and leans the sign up on a rock at the edge of the wetland before the road and thinks the word maybe should have been “fast,” not “slow.” The original idea was that kinaakag and miskwaadesiwag should slow down before they cross the road and just think about whether the risk is worth it. Just sit with it for a minute. Just consider all of the other possibilities before stepping out onto the pavement.

Now it seems like the word “fast” was the better choice, as in, if you are making this journey don’t fiddle fart around. Get to the other side as quickly as possible. But “slow” is already done, so there you go.

Kinaak could lounge around all day in the pond now that the sign is up instead of moving each piece of shattered carapace off the road and burying it after each execution. But the problem of roads is easier to mitigate for Kinaak that the bigger problems of the pond. Even a two-degree change in annual temperature wipes out one gender of turtles, and housing prices have skyrocketed now that there are   
hardly any wetlands left.

Kinaak is a faster, like Makwa. Each winter, Kinaakag go deep, below the mud of the pond and slow their drum beat to one beat every ten minutes, and lower their body temperature to nearly 0 degrees C.

they gather  
in the winter lodge   
formed from earth   
and ice

slow   
pray   
sing   
dream

earth below   
world above   
wait things out   
but together.

Kinaak has done this  
for forty thousand years.   
yes. yes.  
fasting is the secret to life.

fasting   
is  
the   
secret  
to growing the biggest heart.

A heart so big, that it’s the only sound. 

A heart so big, it is the only answer.

Kinaak   
wakes,   
warms,   
quickens.

Kinaak leans their SLOW sign up on a rock at the edge of the wetland and before the road and begins to remove the pieces of carapace from the pavement.

And when Kinaak removes the last broken piece of shell, they look back to see Kwezens installing her homemade SLOW, TURTLES signs using laminated poster board and her brother’s old sawed-off hockey sticks on each side of the road and on either side of the wetland.

A heart so big, now there are two.

Writer

Humour

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A poem by writer, academic and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Composition: The Sound of a Heart

Cason Sharpe is a writer currently based in Toronto. His first collection of stories, _Our Lady of Perpetual Realness_, was released by Metatron Press in 2017.

I didn’t go to art school. Instead, I opted to major in political science, thinking it to be the more practical decision, only to realize upon graduation that the job market cares more about who you know than what you studied. I ended up in the arts rather than politics because the art school kids threw better parties.

As a political science major, I learned about the Socratic method and its desired outcome of aporia, a state of perplexity meant to clarify and challenge presumptions. At art-school parties, I often found myself taking on the role of studio major interlocutor: “Why do you think your crit went so badly?” I’d ask. Responses were almost always impassioned, fuelled by a frustration with professors, peers and, oftentimes, the artist’s own scattershot ability to express themselves.

In Alex Bag’s _Untitled Fall ’95_ (1995), the camera is the artist’s interlocutor, its presence the catalyst that pushes her to question what she thinks she knows about art. The cult classic video piece, required viewing for any newly enrolled art student, sees Bag adopting the persona of an undergrad transplanted to New York City to pursue a degree in studio art at SVA. Split into eight segments, each set at the beginning of a new semester, the video charts the progres- sion of Bag’s alter ego from starry-eyed freshman to world-weary senior, her naive idealism eroding into disillusionment by graduation.

Each segment is shot confessional style, Bag talking directly into the camera. With each semester comes a new haircut and fresh set of revelations. She’s an instantly endearing hero, her youthful lack of self-awareness as charming as it is cringeworthy. In her first semester, she’s chuffed to be around like-minded people, “unlike my mom and dad,” she says, “who like, just do not get me at all.” It’s hard to watch her without the uncanny recognition of a younger self.

As the video progresses, we watch the development of an artistic consciousness. “Advertising is so evil,” our hero says during her second semester, her first foray into criticism. “It’s like, I don’t care if I ever make money with my work.” A sour critique in her sixth semester triggers an awareness of the institution’s thinly veiled misogyny. At this point, we notice a shift in the artist’s speech; still punctuated by “ums” and “likes,” her thoughts are now fully formed, her jabs a little sharper, the subjects of her critiques more precise. She notes the uselessness of her studio professor, who sits on the sidelines “groov- ing on, like, any speck of dust because it reminds him of his own work.” She describes the painter she assists over the summer as “all on his cellular, bitch- ing about every artist on the face of the Earth while I’m making his paintings for five dollars an hour.” The final sequence shows the artist, hair shorn into a DIY pixie cut. She holds a single tulip, her gaze fixed to a spot just beyond the camera. Is this our hero’s graduation? After a few minutes of steely-eyed com- posure, the artist breaks down and sobs, perhaps for an innocence she hadn’t realized she’d lost.

This Bildungsroman is punctuated by a series of vignettes that interrupt the narrative with the regularity of commercial breaks, the artist slipping in and out of enough wigs, costumes, voices and embodiments to make a character actor blush. Bag hangs quilts as backdrops to create makeshift sets, and casts a series of action figures, stuffed animals and other bits of childhood detritus as her co-stars. It’s as if these sequences were filmed in the artist’s teenage bedroom at her parents’ house over the winter holidays, every shot kept tight enough to keep a princess canopy out of frame. The intimacy of this staging lends itself to the thrill of voyeurism, the viewer watching Bag play alone in front of the camera as though through the crack of a door left ajar.

In one scene, reminiscent of a Punch and Judy skit, a Hello Kitty plush toy (manually operated and voiced by an off-camera Bag affecting a squeaky soprano) sidesteps the obnoxious advances of a Ronald McDonald puppet (Bag in a gravelly tenor). Another features an oft-circulated clip of Bjork explaining the science of television, presented split-screen alongside footage of a wide-eyed Bag, who nods along with the awe of a devotee (“You shouldn’t let poets lie to you,” advises the Icelandic songstress, which is coincidentally the same advice Socrates gives to his followers at the end of Plato’s _Republic_). In yet another vignette, this one a parody of an adult chatline ad, the artist dons a blond wig and white camisole to seductively goad viewers to call her, but instead of erotic missives, Bag’s operator uses the promise of validation as bait (“Are you tired of being overworked, underpaid, under-appre- ciated, devalued, humiliated day after day after day after day?” she asks), only to antagonize her callers once she gets them on the line (“Well she’s right,” the operator sighs into an orange land-line receiver, presumably addressing one of her clients. “You _are_ selfish and inconsiderate”). My favourite vignette stars two UK shopgirls (Bag in a neon-green wig and Bag in straw-yellow wig, respectively), who toss potential lyrics for their punk band back and forth during a slow day at work. “What do you think of this?” the green-haired retail associate asks her colleague-bandmate. “Boring boring / buy this dress / boring boring / world’s a mess…” The shopgirls’ anthem points to an argument that Bag builds throughout the vid- eo, that perhaps the important work of art-making happens outside the classroom or studio, in the dull, looping hours an artist spends at her minimum-wage job or alone in her tiny, overpriced apartment. These vignettes drag on, the camera sometimes capturing a second or two on an operator’s leg before abruptly cutting back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The episodic cable TV structure of the piece is no coincidence, given that Bag’s satire targets pop culture as much as it does the art world or the academy. The result is a video that shows an artist learning to wrestle with the competing elements of the world around her, from pretentious professors, precarious employment and the still-lingering trauma of adolescence, to the ubiquity of pop stars, network TV and the incessant advertising that attempts, as she puts it, “to sell \[her\] culture back to \[her\].” The diaristic direct address of Bag’s art-school student is reminiscent of a reality TV confessional, a convention that was just establishing itself in the mid-’90s with the rising popularity of shows like _The Real World_, later to be adapted by YouTube vloggers in the internet era. It’s a piece very much of its time (in one scene, the artist espouses the virtues of _Beavis and Butt-Head_ while wearing an X-girl shirt), resulting in a double-layered hindsight for me, 25 years later, watching the cultural artifacts of a bygone era presented by the proxy of a younger self (I was a toddler when this video came out, but am now older than the artist was when she made it). These Gen X signifiers don’t dilute the video’s contemporary potency; in the specificity of her references, Bag hits upon the universal, allowing her to reach across time to a new vanguard of artists as if to say “Don’t worry, I too struggled to find my voice.”

By her last semester, Bag’s character trusts her critical instincts enough to begin dissecting these various influences on her own terms. “I know I’m not stupid,” she declares in her final monologue, “because, y’know, I work really hard every day to learn, and to put things together, and find allies, and change, and grow, y’know?” By the apex of this speech, the artist achieves the clarity of aporia: “I don’t want to be stupid,” she says, “but I also don’t think that any one person can, y’know, know the answers to everything.” A quarter century later, the sentiment still rings true.

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Cason Sharpe dives deep into Alex Bag’s film _Untitled Fall ’95_, which follows the character’s progression from freshly enrolled art student to graduating senior, illuminating certain tropes, traps, and uncomfortable truths of our milieu in the process.

One Thing: Untitled Fall '95

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The Image Centre

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Editorial

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

We have been taking the important, aggrieving and revolutionary events that began in the wake of George Floyd’s death incredibly seriously, understanding that his horrific murder was one in a string of more than four centuries’ worth of anti-Black discrimination and violence, including lynching. While police force epitomizes some of the most overt manifestations of systemic inequity, the effects of white supremacy are omnipresent, including in the arts. _C Magazine’s_ latest organizational message—including actions toward anti-oppression in our workplace and in our approach to content commissioning, past, present and future—can be found on page ten, or online [here](https://cmagazine.com/issues/146/letter-to-the-reader). 

We considered dramatically delaying this already delayed issue themed on “Humour,” first in light of the pandemic, and then in light of the Black Lives Matter uprising: two sources of exceptional individual, community and collective grief, each of which prompt different but in many cases overlapping imperatives for how things need to change. At the time of this writing, the world couldn’t feel heavier; I’m personally focused on how to take on more of this burden in order to unburden my BIPOC friends, family, lovers and peers, and I implore our white readers to do the same. 

Ultimately, we agreed that constant uncertainty seems to be the only thing we can count on (when would a “better” time come—or, would it?), and that humour has surely had _some_ place—of whatever proportion—in the processing of every significant moment of history, however harrowing. (Already, as I’m finalizing this text, there is a proliferation of deeply funny memes about Officer Stacy’s tearful, tone-deaf plea, spirited laughter from monument-topplers and a freckling of new articles about artists who use humour to make sense of difficult matters and set forth more accessible discursive modes.) While we aren’t so deluded to think that an issue foregrounding this phenomenon offers an antidote to this unprecedented compounding of so many systemic ills, humour is explored in these pages as a way of exposing the machinations of power through creative means, thus inviting us to approach their dismantling creatively, too. If nothing else, maybe the word alone, when sighted peeking out of our readers’ mailboxes, runs a chance of sending a small, sweet jolt to the heart; a split-second reminder of the distinct melody of a loved one’s laugh, or of a time when lightness felt a little easier to find. 

At the conception of this issue at the top of 2020, not long before the pandemic arrived in North America, it began as an inquiry into (and to some degree _a pursuit of_) joy. Observing that institutional critique in art, art programming, art writing and social media had become a permanent condition from which all our activities originated, I began to wonder what impact this sustained applied pressure might have on who we might become—as individuals, in our respective roles in this sector, and as a whole, however fractured. Would care, self-care, episodic pleasure, kinship and calling in be enough to counterbalance the weight of this ultra-serious, important, implicit layer of our work? Where was joy located in an art world hyper-selective about sentimentality and hell-bent on justifying its ever-troubled existence by adhering itself as tightly as disciplinarily possible to the political exigencies of our time? (Understanding, of course, that such efforts are a pursuit of joy in the sense that joy should follow from justice.) If that space was nil or limited, how might that terse condition come to shape not only our work, but our selves and our many relationships? 

To this end, I became interested in humour as a permutation of joy—in its curious efficacy as something that at once allows us to participate in sustained critique, but also sustains our strangeness, our spirits, the nimbleness of our perspective (“I _use_ humour” together with “I _feel_ joy” from humour, this marrying of instrumentalization and sensation). I thought it worthwhile to consider the way humour complicates certain conversations by introducing nonsense (or just “sense” according to different contexts, logics or world views) into the equation, reminding us of the constructedness of any given situation, allowing us to consider how it might be de- and then re-constructed, but differently. It is this dimension of humour that feels salient despite that this historic moment we find ourselves in is anything but funny. 

In the early days, I had EB White’s definition of humour in mind—“the sly and almost imperceptible ingredient that sometimes gets in”—with the idea that by aggregating some practices and strains of thought, without overdetermining their relationships, and knowing how hard it is to pin down, something unexpected might take shape. Laughter would be a possible and welcome by-product, but it wasn’t really the point. In fact, I was cautious of the setup-punchline structure, which is a tried-and-true recipe for laughs but relies (often problematically, as Hannah Gadsby outlines in her explosively successful stand-up special “Nanette” in 2018) on tension and release, which she calls “abusive,” and which often comes at the cost of omitting important parts of the story (especially in autobiographical comedy by members of oppressed groups) that would make release impossible. “Abusive” surfaces in humour, too, harking back to playground days, when a bully would re-cast their dig as “joke” after their subject unexpectedly fought back, a dirty rhetorical manoeuvre that some people unfortunately don’t outgrow.

Mindful of keeping these cheap, unproductive and sometimes outright nasty instantiations of the genre at bay, as the issue began to unfold, it started to become apparent that in the context of contemporary art, humour seems most likely to come about where artists dispense with dichotomous thinking altogether. As Robin Simpson wrote in his introduction to a conversation with Life of a Craphead (Amy Lam and Jon McCurley) in _C Magazine’s_ “Monuments” issue, “Each title \[of the duo’s works\] plays the setup to—but not, to my mind—an assurance of a laugh to follow. Instead, they are setups that leave you time to trade your anticipation for attention and understand in this suspension that you’re now to follow up on the details.” In short, if there are setups, they’re invitations to roam; in all the space between and beyond poles is crude possibility (cue the old gender studies adage “it’s not ‘either-or,’ it’s ‘both-and’”). My fellow queers know that even the staunchest defaults are not natural, and that while starting everything from scratch may at times seem terrifying, it’s our best bet (or, in many cases, our only option) at making meaning that feels autonomous, not contingent. 

In our opening feature, Caitlin Chaisson writes about the fact that despite their differences, in both comedy and contemporary art, explanation is considered the death knell, and goes on to create a weird, compelling framework with which to consider the definition of humour. Quoting Henri Bergson, she suggests that humour arises when “the ‘circumstances of the case called for something else’”—distilling so clearly this notion that the phenomena arises extra to the scripted world. Taking these considerations around explanation (and its obverse, mystery) a step further, Leah Schulli, in her interview with the artist Madelyne Beckles, asks: “Do you think that if you make something that’s entertaining and funny, then it’s often read as accessible in a way that threatens to debunk the sort of esoteric nature of contemporary art?” It got stuck in my head, for articulating something at the heart of what felt taboo about endeavouring this issue, and invited further questions about the relationship between these two genres, which I address more later on. 

Schulli probes the artist’s wryly parodic citation of feminist texts, which unfurls into a complex conversation about gender and the evolution of feminist discourse—its commodification, its expansion, (its dilution?) and the instincts of its purveyors, in some cases, to problematize earlier generations of thinkers. Beckles makes her position clear: “I think it’s healthy to have a complicated relationship with these texts.” Christina Hajjar engages these questions in her review of _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_, too, at one point citing Kyla Wazana Tompkins, who asks: “Do we always have to slaughter our mothers? And, at another level, can feminist thinking … engage differently when it is time to learn from emergent or long-suppressed or traumatized ideas and formations?” In both cases (and others in these pages), there is a close questioning of the reflex to write things off (or cancel them), stirring thinking about how such reflexes are initiated, who is or isn’t served in continuing to practice them and how they shape the field of discussion. 

Do they perpetuate scripts, or do they encourage deviation therefrom? In the dialogue between Paul Chaat Smith and New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society,” including Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys, the possibilities of experimental, anti-dichotomous learning opportunities in Indigenous-settler relations are explored. In light of “the New York City art-institution arms race to adopt \[land\] acknowledgement” a few years ago, which marked the beginning of the collective’s relationship with a number of institutions, Adam said, the group “started talking more and more about how we could not be contained by the fact that we were being informants,” and instead “use that as a position of power brokering.” The beating heart of this conversation, which has been condensed here from a version more than twice its current length, is a seriously pursued anti-essentialist agenda shared between both interviewer and interviewees. For NRO, this manifests mostly as performances that stir—but also rigorously make space, however uncouth, in which to process—settlers’ shame, guilt and even problematic (or dubbed as such) desires. Their work aims to grip the discomfort involved in these dynamics in an effort to wear down the shock, which they see as preventing more complex, proactive conversations. 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s _The Sound of a Heart_ arose from her contemplation of humour as it pertains to the trickster figure (which she’s pursued at length in her Nanabush/Nanabozho stories)—its non-binary nature, its capacity as a teacher and its use of performance to disseminate wisdom. Here, in our Composition column, readers are offered yet another avenue through which to consider the pursuit of meaningful inter-subjective exchange and sincere allyship (or accompliceship, as friends of mine have taken to saying). This entry elegantly prompts questions about the ways one’s steadfast, wholehearted commitments to their community can inspire participation from without. 

Performance is perhaps unsurprisingly dominant in this issue. Karina Irvine homes in on Mike Bourscheid’s sensitive interrogation (and often subtle ridicule) of constructs of masculinity and heteronormativity, which manifest mostly as intricate handmade costumes and performances that foreground humility and play. On the opening night of his solo exhibition _Thank you so much for the flowers_ (2017) at the Luxembourg Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, he performed wearing a ceramic flower vase helmet he’d made, with the idea that it might end up being either overflowing with flowers or completely empty (which he’s described as “a joke that can go either way”). His approach outlines the usefulness of self-effacement, deep reflection and even sometimes wilful humiliation in scrutinizing one’s own privilege, whatever the variety. 

Parker Kay turns to performance art and “alternative comedy”—which came about “in response to the mostly male-dominated, often misogynous, observation-based comedy that was popular in the ’80s and ’90s”—to consider the way practitioners in both genres, which have cross-pollinated since the early aughts, straddle the personal and the performed, drawing a parallel to Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism. Lisa Smolkin’s artist project _Say “Hi,”_ created for this issue and performed for the camera and a live audience at the Banff Centre, makes a fitting entry into this particularly beguiling strain of performance art, wherein the artist “at once perform\[s\] and, at the same time, expose\[s\] the manifold conditions in which the performance is situated” (as Kay put it). Where does Lisa, the person, end, and Lisa, the performer begin? “Smolkin deploys self-parody to implicate herself as she considers how a desire for self-actualization butts up against the realities of social hierarchy,” Aliya Pabani writes in the accompanying text. “But that ambiguity facilitates a more empathic spectatorship: whoever she is, we’re rooting for her.” Cason Sharpe faces this productive ambiguity as well in his backward glance at Alex Bag’s cult classic video work, _Untitled Fall ’95_, which follows our protagonist as she weathers the seasons of her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Freckled with laugh-out-loud funny moments, it is, on one hand, essential viewing for the more emerging among us and, on the other, almost eerily timeless in the way it details certain tropes, traps and uncomfortable truths of our milieu. 

I hope I’ve not killed the funny in any of these practices by culling them all together in the name of humour—doing that thing of naming that Chaisson sort of cautions against. But, whether absurd, defamiliarizing, taunting, illuminating, instructive or playful, this issue represents some of humour’s elasticity as a tool of critique, of unmasking, of interruption, of… dare I say, joy? Working with all the thematic contributors, and thinking through these practices with them, has confirmed for me how hard-won humour is—even at its most effortless. In order for it to tick, to have that x factor, to maybe even get a laugh (that unconscious, delicious acknowledgement), one needs to be able to hold all kinds of contradictions together simultaneously, and from there, cook up exponential new combinations of their composite parts. As Emily Pelstring writes in her review of Walter Scott’s recent exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre: “Doesn’t our proclivity for neat, clear structures and hierarchical distinctions reek of competition, territorialism and pride?” It seems wise, especially these days, to consider what more can be started from scratch, to resist pre-existing, clean cut judgments and to get a bit more comfortable with seeing everything as unfixed, as it is. 

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Editor Jaclyn Bruneau reflects on the issue’s theme: Humour.

Editorial: Humour

Feature

Madelyne Beckles does not take herself too seriously. In her video work, sincerity and irony work in tandem to deliver a message that lets you in on the joke enough to laugh but, at the same time, delivers a faint punch to the gut. Gendered labour, targeted consumerism, pop culture and a canon of feminist theory are playfully subjected to her low-brow camera and prop work. Beckles doesn’t spare herself when it comes to her firm but fair style of roasting, acknowledging her active participation in every avenue of culture that she aims to debunk; “With today’s brand of feminism, you no longer have to compromise looking cute!” she exclaims while posing in a negligee in _Womanism is a Form of Feminism Focused Especially on the Conditions and Concerns of Black Women_ (2016). Making intersectional feminist art can feel like a trap, because there is always going to be someone who feels excluded from the narrative, or otherwise offended. The two of us had a discussion about the pitfalls of this hypersensitive discursive landscape of intersectionality today, the ever-evolving face of feminism and how these things inform the artist’s creative endeavours. 

> **LEAH SCHULLI:** In your 2017 video _Theory of a Young Girl_, you bring the viewer into this pastel pink, lo-fi dream world filled with nail polish, lipstick and perfume bottles. You’re in a baby doll dress and expelling one-liners such as “When I was 12 years old, I decided to be beautiful!” which is one of many excerpts from Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a _Theory of the Young-Girl_. What is your relationship to this text, and how did this work come about?

**MADELYNE BECKLES:** That book kind of epitomized and contextualized what was so enticing yet grotesque about the early aughts as a pop-culture era to me, who was a preteen at the time. That period of time was very sexist in both its infantilizing and over-sexualizing of young women, but still very formative to me—so much so that I have a tattoo that says “2005.” The _Playboy_, hyperfemme, candy-coloured, Paris Hilton “That’s hot” aesthetic was almost uncanny—synthetic and real at the same time—and Tiqqun’s text also really teeters \[on\] that line. 

When Tiqqun refers to “the young girl,” it’s not actually to a young girl, but to a particularly self-destructive mode of consumerism, almost similar to the way that Eve becomes a symbol for the fall of all women in the Bible. This choice completely takes the humanism out of the critique of the commodification and sexualization of adolescent women, which makes it very explicit, upsetting and almost violent. Ariana Reines, who translated the original text from French to English, became physically ill while working on the translation, and many readers find it extremely contentious. 

> **_Womanism is a Form of Feminism_ playfully uses canonical feminist texts—some by Black feminist authors, and others by second- and third-wave white authors who have been criticized for their politics and seen as alienating in terms of contemporary race and gender discourse, like Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer—as props for a faux infomercial that pokes fun at the commodification of feminism. Can you talk about your decisions to use these particular texts, and your tongue-in-cheek approach to citation, broadly?** 

It’s funny because that piece has been described as using “the” canon of feminist texts as props, but it’s more specifically _my_ canon because they mostly came from my time in school. De Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex_ was something I had to read in the first “women’s” studies class I ever took, and I never read it. I remember thinking, “I don’t understand how anyone could get through this.” It was so abstract to me because French feminism is so different from how we currently understand feminism in a North American context. Obviously it’s a classic, so I have it, but am I ever going to read it? Probably not. 

Greer’s _The Whole Woman_ represents my first ever feminist moment in an academic setting. I was in this creative writing class in high school, and for an assignment, we had to read this essay about genital mutilation. In some roundabout way, the teacher asked, “What type of essay would you say this is?” And I remember being like, “It’s feminist.” So, he gave me this book, and by the time I had made that piece, I had never opened it. The work was intending to poke fun at the canon and how it had become somewhat trendy to possess this knowledge. 

> **Right, so it was more about your personal connections to these titles, and about positioning them as symbols of a particular generation of thought, than about making any commentary on the texts themselves. It’s an interesting artistic decision to take books written in specific historical, geographic, cultural contexts and supplant them in a new context without reading them, making them into a kind of fetish object. Do you think this approach calls for a different conception of “citation”?** 

I’m not precious about the idea of citation and don’t feel the need to deconstruct it in that way. I’m more interested in the feminist device of auto-theory, and making texts anecdotal, and therefore accessible. 

Although I did finally read _The Whole Woman_ in 2018 when I was playing around with this footage that I had shot a few years earlier of me making pancakes topless for an exhibition. I had just moved in with my partner and I was thinking about feminist modes of contemplation surrounding domesticity, and I picked up this book that turned out to be this incredibly gendered, dated and problematic kind of ’90s textbook about being a woman. In spite of its shortcomings, it really spoke to me during this time when I felt I was becoming more domesticized; I welcomed this sort of prescriptive on how to unpack that. 

> **Did having that more sincere experience with the text later change the way you thought about how you had used it in the video?** 

Not really; if anything, it totally validated my decision to use it. Even though I got something out of the text, it’s very biologically essentialist as a whole, so in the context of teasing out the canon (no pun intended!), it’s very emblematic of the 20th century and second-wave feminist politics. I think it’s healthy to have a complicated relationship with these texts and to not read them dogmatically. 

I feel like that whole stage of making work was me trying to figure out how to create and also how to get people to listen. So, I would put a crazy wig on, make a slutty video and then kind of shove something smart in there. It’s a common feminine tactic: dress up and pretend you’re like this so that they’ll listen when you talk about that. 

Anne Hirsch is somebody that really inspired me; she would talk in this sexy baby voice about theory, using that particular style of DIY YouTube comedy as an aesthetic or a framework. Jayson Musson in his Hennessy Youngman character would take a principle of art history and just talk about it, performing as this kind of everyday dude talking about formalist aesthetics. In a way, he was sort of the new John Berger. His work was super inspiring to me, just stuff that didn’t totally commit to being one thing. There is also Casey Jane Ellison, with her experimentation of feminine archetypes, and use of the Valley girl affect in her speech while maintaining conceptual rigor.

> **Do you think that if you make something that’s entertaining and funny, then it’s often read as accessible in a way that threatens to debunk the sort of esoteric nature of contemporary art?** 

Totally. I think art is so earnest, and therefore so vulnerable, so using parody is a way to make a joke before anybody else can. Maybe it’s sort of a defence— not entirely defensive, but I think that’s part of it. But parody, at least when it’s deployed in the context of art, is just as earnest as art; there still has to be some kind of intention, and maybe that’s where it differs from media and comedy. 

> **What do you think is the efficacy of irony today? Particularly in a contemporary art landscape that, as you say, has tended to use such devices as defence mechanisms?** 

I think that particular widely shareable and reproduced ironic language—visual, verbal and textual—is largely for the internet now and lives in the territory of memers, edgelords, the “dirtbag left” and trolls. 

> **Considering the use of parody in your work, what’s your relationship to earnestness?** 

I think the earnestness in my work has come from Black feminist politics; when I was making fun of the so-called canon, that kind of positioned me to have a bit of authority. _Black Looks: Race and Representation_ by bell hooks is one of the most important books to my ideology and practice as an artist. It was the first book I ever read that combined feminism with cultural criticism and race politics in this way that was very legitimizing to me; it did things like use Madonna’s fetishization of Black signifiers and culture as an example of perpetuating or fucking up representation. 

> **Have you ever been afraid of being perceived as “problematic”?**

Honestly, I really, really was. But how can you not be problematic? Remember last summer when we were discussing how many things we had to cancel ourselves over and were essentially fighting for the time to share the worst thing we’ve ever done? 

I think call-out culture now is just trolling. I’m not super active on “woke Twitter,” but if you’re constantly waiting to poke at somebody’s fuck-up, in terms of intersectional feminist politics specifically, obsessing over that is somewhat contradictory. To me, it’s inherently neoliberal to centre proper politics on an individual: policing the minutiae in regards to the behaviour of our peers distracts us from directing our frustrations and critique onto the larger systemic issues that are put in place by those in power. Most of the feminism that I get down with is about the collective, so I just think that if we’re supposed to change collectively, one-on-one aggression is maybe not the best place to start. If somebody says something really fucked up, by all means go for it. But I’m trying \[to\] actually think of something I _would_ call out… and I don’t know. 

Since diving into podcasting, I feel like the spitfiring and nuanced readings of ideas that lend themselves well to that medium has actually kind of changed the way we call in and out, at least in certain circles. Because you are listening to people speak in a more realistic manner than they would in a polished piece of art or writing, the host’s casualness and delivery allow them to explore ideas (or even contradict themselves) in ways that may not fly in a different context. 

Also, I feel like because feminism is on the outs, call-out culture is also on the outs. 

> **We’ve had a lot of conversations about the word “feminism” and how much it has evolved in the last decade, having been co-opted in a social, political and economic sense. Is this what you mean when you say feminism is on the outs?**

That is what I mean; it sold itself out by becoming a means to gain capital. When something sells out and becomes so easily consumable, there’s an obvious compromise that happens somewhere, and in this case, it’s inevitably shown up in the politics. 

> **On that note, can you explain what you’ve referred to as “pan-feminism”?** 

Pan-feminism is the result of this equalizing effect, in which a variety of supposedly meaningful political actions exist under a singular, all-encompassing umbrella. Posting a no-makeup selfie, being involved in a grassroots organization to aid racial justice or scolding a peer online for wording something incorrectly can all be treated as important feminist operations that carry a similar weight. It’s simplified to a point that every action that is performed by a woman is political, largely for various kinds of gain, and I think we can get a bit deeper than that. 

> **Would you still describe yourself as first and foremost a feminist artist?**

This is something that’s a very real struggle for me, and it’s a big part of why I haven’t made anything in a while. I wouldn’t say no because feminism is what the aesthetic sensibilities and the content of my work has mostly centred around—theory, texts, pop culture and exploring femininity. However, I feel as if I’m at this turning point in my practice because I don’t feel so attached to these ideas and they’re not inspiring me to make things. I don’t know if I’m that kind of artist anymore. 

> **What forms of feminism still feel right?** 

To me, bell hooks’s definitions and articulations of feminism stand the test of time: “to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” 

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Leah Schulli interviews artist Madelyne Beckles about the way her often parodic practice entangles the so-called canon of feminist theory with current conversations about intersectionality, neoliberalism and pop culture, and the complicated and evolving relationship between ideology and reality more broadly.

Healthy, Complicated Relationships: An Interview with Madelyne Beckles

Caitlin Chaisson is an independent curator and critic based in New York. 

It is day six of my 14-day quarantine and the couch cushions have finally yielded to the demands of conformity, marks furrowed into the foam like a defeated countenance. The loneliness of solitary isolation is almost tempered by the casual acquaintance I’ve made with this shadowy impression of a permanently reclining figure. The surrounding apartment is undergoing a metallurgical transformation all its own, with aluminum building up in every corner; three times a day the accretions mount in a clanging jumble of cylinders and serrated disks. Stripped of soggy papers that picture radiant climes, the canned peaches, tuna and beans become indistinguishable—but so do many of the things I once considered important, as life comes to a frightening standstill.

Twenty-eight years ago, the United States was weathering a different kind of tempest. After ravaging the Bahamas, Hurricane Andrew barrelled into the mainland at 265 km per hour, devastating Florida and Louisiana and spawning tornadoes and heavy rainfall in many other states. The Category 5 storm claimed lives and inflicted widespread structural damage, requiring the biggest national disaster aid package of its time. During the next several years of reconstruction, the aftermath of the hurricane would occasionally surface in news and media.

Four years later, in 1996, curator Renée Riccardo offered Rachel Harrison her first solo exhibition at Arena Gallery, a small parlour room in a Brooklyn brownstone. The installation, _Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?_, takes its title from the lede of a 1995 _New York Times_ article regarding the structural preparedness of buildings to withstand severe weather.[^1] This installation was recently restaged in the artist’s survey exhibition, _Rachel Harrison Life Hack_, at the Whitney Museum. A stand-alone room built for the artwork replicated the size and floor plan of the original. In the Whitney’s version, Harrison embedded documentation of the first installation as a _mise en abyme_ among the restaged components. 

_Should home windows or shutters…_ looks as though some errant technician already pressed the detonation button, and the two-by-four didn’t just punch a tidy three-inch hole through some window—but blasted the entire space to smithereens. The walls of the room are covered in a patchwork of wooden veneer panels—birch, cherry, oak, brick—hammered upon one another with the same kind of hasty craftsmanship one would expect of someone shuttering a grocery against gale-force winds. Made with materials straight from shelves of a local hardware store, some barely framed free-standing walls jut into the centre of the space, held together in the tightened jaws of screw clamps.

In spite of the structural turmoil, the room is decorated. A number of framed photographs adorn the walls, many of them depicting a still-life study of trash bags on the side of a curb. The lumpen forms are visually echoed by cans of peas littered throughout the space. The non-perishables are suspended from wires, slotted into architectural cavities or mounted to the wall by globular pedestals painted in acid colours. The provisions are provisionally scattered, a pun I use with a playful nod toward Harrison’s penchant for gag-like humour. Her practice frequently makes use of dime store props and fetid innuendos, nestled within highly ambiguous material arrangements.

Although most contemporary artists deal with humour from a safe ironic distance, Harrison’s has been described as biting, brainy, barbed or dark. In any case, I’ve never interpreted her humour as making light of otherwise difficult—or quite frankly, traumatic—situations, be it hurricanes or systemic misogyny. So, what does the humour do? Her comic effects are striking in their explicit obviousness, bright flashes in the pan that contrast starkly to the difficulties in decoding the rest of the artwork. In one of the first reviews of the original installation at Arena Gallery, critic Roberta Smith imparts to readers that Harrison’s aim seemed to be “to create a commentary on obsolescence, garbage, and shoddy workmanship, as well as formalist abstraction. Or something like that.”[^2] Though Smith’s tone might sound flippant, I read it as smartly emblematic of Harrison’s practice: funny and defiant. In David Joselit’s more recent catalog essay, “Rachel Harrison: Untranslatable,”[^3] he conveys how her work vexes those who attempt overarching descriptions. The assemblages are as resistant to summation as a flame-retardant fibre is to fire, and the sculptural installations are incommensurable—diverse materials held together tentatively, in such a way that the meaning of no one thing is subordinate to any other.

In Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”(1966), she laments the oppressive trendiness of content-based interpretations of an artwork, how they marginalize more sensory and affective experiences. “Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable,”[^4] Sontag acknowledges, but can easily become formulaic—or worse, run the risk of being “crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit.”[^5] Sontag pegs interpretation as the vengeful attack of the intellect on art itself, comparing the resultant platitudes to the noxious fumes of automobiles. While conceding that certainly, there is a time and a place for interpretation, she disparagingly describes it as a “thick encrustation”[^6] that forms around works of art and their makers. Explaining an artwork kills it. Entombs it.

Explaining a joke also kills it. This might be one of the most vital shared concerns between artists and comedians. The polite question “What does it mean?” is verboten in both contexts—confined to being whispered in hushed voices because, however well-intentioned, the explanation is the tolling of the death knell. Written many years before Sontag’s essays, French philosopher Henri Bergson’s treatise _Laughter_ (1911) likewise entertains a concept of crustiness, but in reference to the subject of humour. For Bergson, the comical emerges when “something mechanical is encrusted upon the living.”[^7] Life, in Bergson’s terms, is supple. It is constantly changing, always unique and imbued with a graceful vitalism. Laughter erupts in moments of “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.”[^8] The man who trips and falls is funny because he marched forward robotically, despite the gaping hole before him. As Bergson identifies, the “circumstances of the case called for something else,”[^9] and knowing that, we laugh.

Harrison’s work is really crusty. The fist-sized wads of hardened spray foam and papier mâché scattered throughout the installation have a mealy texture of some unidentifiable thing you might scrape from the underside of a table. Forms you probably would never notice unless the table were to be violently upturned. The crusty sculptures are funny if only because of how futile it is to try and understand what they mean. In this way, Harrison is plopped between Sontag and Bergson. For Sontag, interpretation hardens around the art object and encases it, and for Bergson, rigid inflexibility is humorous because it is so inhuman. In an almost perverse revelry, Harrison’s assemblages are most comical in the efforts to decipher them.

The installation _Should home windows or shutters…_ is not _about_ the humanitarian crisis of the hurricane, but it literally makes a room in which to think, “What matters in dire circumstances?” As exceptional events, disasters always require a shift in course. Everything becomes subject to change. To put it in Bergson’s words, the circumstances call for something else. As we bumble to adapt and feel our way through the uncertainty, disasters might present the richest and most unusual watersheds of laughter. Rarely do we try to explain or make sense of tragedy, but sometimes we can laugh in its face.

[^1]: Michael Quint, “A Storm Over Housing Codes,” _The New York Times_, December 1, 1995, D1.
[^2]: Roberta Smith, “Art in Review,” _The New York Times_, March 15, 1996, C27.
[^3]: For more, see Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, eds., _Rachel_ 
_Harrison Life Hack_ (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2019).
[^4]: Susan Sontag, _Against Interpretation, and Other Essays_  (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966; New York: Picador, 2001), 16\. Citations refer to the Picador edition.
[^5]: Sontag, 20.
[^6]: Sontag, 17.
[^7]: Henri Bergson, _Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic_ (New York: Macmillan, 1911; Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 18\. Citations refer to the Dover edition.
[^8]: Bergson, 5.
[^9]: Bergson, 5.

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Caitlin Chaisson considers the inherent contradictions and subtle humour in artist Rachel Harrison’s installation _Should home windows or shutters…_ at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, contextualizing Harrison’s work in relation to Susan Sontag’s _Against Interpretation_ and Henri Bergson’s treatise _Laughter_. 

No Laughing Matter

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

The depth of what we share can often be expressed in a joke; laughing at the same joke usually implies a sense of camaraderie, for better or for worse. A joke can also mock, deride or parody. In his performances, Mike Bourscheid uses humour, absurdity and play to critique structures of capitalism, patriarchy and hetero-normativity, and reminds us of the importance of building alliances through laughter at a time when it is most seriously needed. 

In 2017, Bourscheid represented Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale, where as part of his exhibition _Thank you so much for the flowers_, he performed _Goldbird Variations (Pas de deux)_ (2017), a take on Johann Sebastian Bach’s seminal compositions (_Goldberg Variations_, 1741). Instead of musically harmonic, Bourscheid’s _Variations_ were gestural. In a peculiar handmade costume summoning another era, he assumed the role of a regal figure whose gestures were notably insecure—as if unsure of where to put his hands. All in a rich golden hue, the dress shirt with a starched high collar was tucked into a skirt with a crinoline that extended from his midline both frontwards and backwards, drooping like two flaccid phalluses and finished with a ruffled hem. The style of his hat was somewhere between a Dixie cup and pillbox hat, with a chinstrap. Around 20 shapes of different co-lours embroidered all over the costume prompted his deliberate and programmed gestures. In the gloves he wore, his index fingers and thumbs protruded from cut holes in each tip. Running his fingertips over a shape signalled him to shift his position: crossed arms at breast; pause; move hands on hips; pause again; then, rest an unflinching gaze on the viewer, as if studying his own pose in a mirror. It was a kind of rehearsal of fake confidence and authority, with Bourscheid channelling a hesitant and effeminate nature that worked to emasculate the alpha male stereotype, ridiculing the impotence of powerful men. An insecure big bird posing as a dignified cock. 

A studied approach to gesture has been famously outlined in Gilbert Austin’s _Chironomia; or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery_ (1806). In it, Austin warns against “undignified gesticulations, and … absurd distortions” that put the orator’s ambitions to inspire at risk of becoming laughable. _Chironomia_ is a practical guide that illustrates a range of gestures—“Body held erect indicates steadiness and courage; Thrown back, pride; Stooping forward, condescension or compassion; Prostration, the utmost humility or abasement”—to be practiced ad infinitum, until they come naturally. Once understood and theoretically mastered, the orator has the ability to harness attention to whatever message they wish to convey. As if a contemporary, pop cultural edition of Austin’s guidebook, Bourscheid’s sequence of movements was based on cowboy films and fashion documentaries, while the focused sensuality of his cues was influenced by the German pianist, consumed by his composition. The subtlety of his gestures, in contrast to the expressive, definitive articulations in _Chironomia_, demonstrates an evolution of poise toward the embodied. 

Using costumes, gestures and scenarios that are sometimes awkward and humiliating, but almost always tender and vulnerable, Bourscheid calls social norms and systems of power into question. In _Goldbird Variations (Pas de deux)_, as in _The wellbeing of things: A 5km race_ (2017), wherein the artist plays a cowboy who confides in a parrot over the course of a journey made on a treadmill, and other works, he takes aim at masculinity by presenting constructions thereof that are slightly askew. He’s influenced by and often uses traditional symbols of domesticity and women’s labour, such as aprons, embroidery and flowers. As Judith Butler rightly states, “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” and Bourscheid explores the fluid boundaries between genders, using his own body to experience this for himself in a way that invites the viewer to acknowledge their own position. 

Bourscheid’s wit relies on the patience of the performer and viewer alike; it unfolds slowly, deliberately and delicately. He performs _Goldbird Variations (Pas de deux)_ while standing on a slipper embedded in the back of a bronze lion—a symbol of power seen everywhere in the streets of Venice—who is also wearing slippers. Two public figures in their domicile, in the pallid light of a golden interior. The viewer, who stumbles in on the performer’s seemingly private exercise, finds themselves in a precarious position. The space melds outer and inner worlds, and this tension between public and private uncovers a shared modesty between audience and performer, exposing the contingency of power, as though the former had intruded on the control room, despite the latter having left the door open. 

In 2012, Bourscheid moved from Luxembourg, where he was born, to the West Coast of Canada. Before its collapse in 1974, Luxembourg’s economy relied heavily on the steel market, which struggled to regain stability until the late ’80s. Bourscheid’s parents were labourers working through this period, his father a welder and his mother a seamstress. In a conversation with Bourscheid, he joked that now he is a seamstress while his wife, the artist Vanessa Brown, works with metal in her practice. The costumes and props that Bourscheid fastidiously produces are rooted in a personal and political past carrying implications of economic disparity, labour disputes and resilience. 

His performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s off-site space late last year, _Ledgers_ (2019), begins from his working-class upbringing with a suite of costumes inspired by industrial workwear. Bourscheid’s series of four performances was in response to Vienna-based artist Erwin Wurm’s installation, _Big Disobedience_ (2016), located at the edge of the business district. In response to Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay _Civil Disobedience_, Wurm created a grouping of enlarged suits fixed in exaggerated poses—a hip thrust, nudge, jab or sidelong kick—and veiled by shadows of the surrounding skyscrapers and luxury condominiums. However, the suits, which suggest high status, are left empty—a visual echo of Thoreau’s remarks that those in service of power suspend their humanity, performing their work “not as men mainly, but as machines.” Bourscheid’s intervention fills the corporeal absence of the ghostly but comedic figures with Madrigal singers, a secular troupe originating from the Renaissance and Baroque periods who usually sang through-composed literary works about serious topics, with careful vocal attention to the exact sound of each word. They moved among the suits, each with a wooden shield in hand and a megaphone supported by an armature protruding from their chest, singing in unison: “Our muscles lean and glistening … rolling dollies … hoisting heavy valuable sculptures,” while redirecting the acoustics of their song with their shields toward the neighbouring high-rises in a pandemonium of layered echoes. 

Bourscheid is a labourer in his day job, working for an art-moving company. As it happens, he’d had an experience moving artwork in a neighbouring building, where he was directed to use back entrances and service elevators, unseen by the upper-class inhabitants as he tended to one of their centrepiece sculptures. While the lyrics, written by Bourscheid and Brown, resonate with a direct experience, they also reflect the precarity of artistic work and need for a supplementary income more broadly in a time when average working hours have increased with the gig economy, while job security is in constant flux and wages stagnate. They chant, “We’re not here for long. We promise… We work and we work,” the repetition of this declaration sending a dark reminder not only of the instability of precarious labour but of our place on earth. The final words of the song, “We leave you this song before, once more,” is a sounding plea that the song be repeated again and again, settling like an incessant earworm in the ears of the elite. Though it may seem absurd to galvanize a singing troupe to challenge capitalism, _Ledgers_ undermines the commercial, materialist enterprise of the art economy and demonstrates the need to work together to quell class disparagement and enact social justice. 

Bourscheid’s most recent performance earlier this year at the Western Front, _Idealverein_ (2020), choreographed by Justine Chambers, moves away from laughing _at_ power toward laughing _as_ power. _Idealverein_, titled after a German word meaning “non-profit organization,” was a six-player game that unfolded over the course of four evenings. It resembled a sport in that the play space was demarcated by an arena, and players wore numbered uniforms. However, though the precise objective of the game was unclear, it was obvious that there was no reason to be in opposition, and that keeping score was futile. 

Outfitted in leather aprons, each player was equipped with props that determined their role but limited their movements—none more so than their elaborate shoes. They wore platform sandals adorned with forged steel filigree: curlicues acted as hooks for boiled eggs, dangling sausages or tufts of long hair. The soles of the shoes were cast in skin colours selected from those represented by emojis, making for an off-putting fleshy prosthetic. Each player per.formed their rehearsed movements, gesticulating with their arms while shuffling, sliding or crawling. 

Each time the players broke to huddle, their bodies became increasingly intertwined, as if constructing a single entity: draped over each other or nestled within a collective embrace. They exchanged their plans of action and needs for the next round. “I will be bugging Erika— blocking her,” one declared in a tone that posed no threat, preparing Erika to think of a defensive manoeuvre. Another solicited the need for more blue lipstick, and in the tangled huddle—through passing the tube and apply-ing—teamwork prepared the players’ lips for the next round. 

The idea of gameplay has been used time and again to reflect on social structures and behaviours. In this game, the purpose seemed to be to acknowledge a shared humanity through a mix of social arrangements, strategies of communication and freedom of play. Through their shared efforts—braiding hair, applying lipstick and feeding one another eggs—the performers impressed on the audience an absurd, confusing model for society based on patience, equity and generosity. 

In the end, the total points were announced for each team, which generated laughter instead of cheers from the audience since, despite their nominal distinction as the “blue” team and the “yellow” team, all the uniforms were the same colour. They were all on the same team. 

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Looking at three of Mike Bourscheid’s performances—_Goldbird Variations (Pas de deux)_ (2017), _Ledgers_ (2019), and _Idealverein_ (2020)—Karina Irvine homes in on the artist’s sensitive interrogation (and often subtle ridicule) of constructs of masculinity, heteronormativity, and competition—offering humility, self-effacement, and play as promising antidotes.

Laughing at Power, Laughing as Power: On Mike Bourscheid

Parker Kay is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He is also sometimes known as Pumice Raft. 

##### “It’s like a twist of the arm,” says Toronto-based artist Kathleen Taylor as she describes her performance _She-Orc_ (2019),[^1] in which she played the titular role, a riff on the _Lord of the Rings_ character that she describes as being “raised in suburban Ontario by humans.”[^2] Taylor appears to the crowd in green face makeup with prosthetic ears and teeth, carrying a hamper full of laundry. Backed by the orc theme music from _The Fellowship of the Ring_ (2001), she dumps her laundry on the wet grass and begins to violently cover it with soil. It is at this point that the arm begins to twist. As Taylor starts to scream in a deep, anguished voice and writhe on top of the soiled clothing, members of the off-camera audience begin to laugh, except for a baby who begins to cry. During our conversation, Taylor mentions that she received feedback that, in this moment, some people felt scared to laugh and others felt offended that people were laughing—a tension that highlights the difficulty of processing the ambiguous territory between the performed and the personal, and points out the fallacy of distance between pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion and, ultimately, comedy and tragedy.
  
  
Under late capitalism, where essentially every part of daily life has been commodified, the individual has come to be quantified as a set of discrete emotional compartments, capturable in the data we wilfully generate, which is in turn leveraged back to us as consumers. As evinced by Taylor’s _She-Orc_, tragicomedy, though perhaps appearing like a two-headed monster, fights for a spectrum of emotional states in protest against binaristic or otherwise siloed emotional conditions. Social theorist Lauren Berlant uses the idea of tragicomedy, too, but to articulate a paradox of modern existence dating back to the mid-20th century, with the emergence of neoliberalism—the very origin of today’s economic, cultural and emotional structures. Within her concept of “cruel optimism,” which refers to the consequences of “the pursuit of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy”[^3] under capitalism, she notes that while such pursuits may appear on the surface as a situation comedy (i.e., sitcom) recalling the genre’s tropes of a good-hearted story where conflict is never dire and instead functions as fodder for the amusement of both character and audience—it will in fact reveal itself to be a “situation tragedy,”[^4] because of the systemic inequality inherent to the existing economic structures. In other words, cruel optimism is “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”[^5]

Roaming across the emotional spectrum is familiar to several performers (comedians, performance artists, actors, etc.) who embody cruel optimism by simultaneously pursuing some version of the good life while also offering insight into the systemic barriers of such pursuits. Artists like Taylor, along with Cotey Pope, Maria Bamford and Brody Stevens, make visible the larger societal hurdles that face all of us within Berlant’s framework by distorting the boundary between the personal and the performed, allowing the performer to at once perform and, at the same time, expose the manifold conditions in which the performance is situated. The result for an audience, beyond entertainment, is a tragicomic tool kit, to help process the obscured and overt layers of harm embedded in day-to-day life, by accessing a more complex, interlinked range of subjective states.

Pope, a Toronto-based artist and performer, often assumes the multiplicitous character of the clown to dance the line between irony and sincerity. The ethos of the clown—the base figure at the core of many performers—is that there is a series of masks that the performer can access at any time, which may empower a side of themselves they might not normally feel comfortable showing, or give permission to do things they wouldn’t normally do. The mask becomes a permeable threshold that gives the performer the ability to be seen on their own terms or feel liberated in remaining hidden. Notions of identity surrounding the role of the performer are a frequent subject in Pope’s work, often tackling pop-culture stereotypes and over-the-top clichés—such as the sitcom, the tortured artist and the out-of-work actor. In _Deborah_ (2016), Pope takes the stage in the titular role to tell of a tragic love story with a person who was only sexually attracted to her when she was dressed as a literal clown. Deborah describes that this act almost drove her to a mental breakdown: “I was performing clown every fucking day for you,”[^6] she exasperatedly shouted over the phone. Here, “performing clown” could be a stand-in for a long list of less outlandish relationship compromises; the confessional mode (whether actual or performed) masked as melodrama allows Pope to express frustration with love, intimacy and relationships. Deborah explains that “although this is all funny … I am pretty heartbroken,”[^7] and then goes on to break the fourth wall by questioning if her suffering is integral to the creation of the performance. She ends her story with a head-banging karaoke rendition of Alanis Morissette’s _You Oughta Know_ with such self abandon, catharsis and sincerity that it appears as if the audience is witness to pure autobiography, a speculation that is never confirmed nor denied.

In moments when the clown’s mask and the unadorned face of the performer are indistinguishable, the audience begins to break through spectatorship and glimpse the meta-narrative between character and the artist’s “real” life. Like many artists, Pope uses social media as an extension of her practice, frequently posting videos chronicling her experience as a working actor, which show her talking directly to the camera in the style of a reality TV confessional. Similarly, _The Cotey Show_ (2018) “details the based on-true-events travails and frequent absurdities experienced by an emerging artist”[^8] in which she “investigates the act of performing the self”[^9] through sitcom-style vignettes. If _The Cotey Show_ is Pope’s way of using comedic cliché, narrative tropes and slapstick to comment on her experiences as an artist, her online persona offers a sort of funhouse mirror image whereby “real” life events are steeped in performance of varying potencies. In other words, Pope leverages the audience’s assumptions about different media as a way to augment the affect of a given performance, which, when experienced alongside more typical stage and screen works, creates a greater emotional gestalt. Her assertion that “the performance artist is not an actor, but can be if they so choose”[^10] illustrates this multiplicity succinctly.

This boundary-blurring, identity-driven, absurdist and sometimes surrealist approach has resonances with “alternative comedy,” which was brought into the mainstream media in the early 2000s, in response to the mostly male-dominated, often misogynous, observation- based comedy that was popular in the ’80s and ’90s. NYC\-based comedians and performance artists pioneering the genre shared stage time at non-traditional venues, resulting in intense cross-pollination which would go on to shape both disciplines, a similar cross-pollination to Toronto’s _Doored_ performance art show (2012 to 2017),[^11] and LA’s _Aesthetical Relations_ — “an itinerant and irregular live talk show experience, bringing together comedians, artists … and other multimedia delights … \[where\] the fourth wall is broken, reassembled, and mixed into a smoothie.”[^12]

In 2006, Bamford, who was one of the early practitioners, suffered a nervous breakdown after being heckled onstage and disappeared for three months before surfacing in Detroit, where a fan saw her selling clock radios on the street. Shortly thereafter, Bamford moved back home with her parents in Duluth, MN, to recover. To the shock of her management, in late 2006, Bamford sent the footage of her “TV show” to Turner Broadcast System; the result was _The Maria Bamford Show_ (2007) in which “a depressed comedian named Maria Bamford—played by Bamford—has a nervous breakdown and moves home to Duluth, tended to by her parents (also played by Bamford).”[^13] Following Marxist economic theorist David Harvey’s observation that “sickness … gets defined within the circulation process as an inability to go to work,”[^14] suggesting that health and well-being is ultimately less important than market productivity, Berlant refers to this facet of cruel optimism as a “slow death.”[^15] _The Maria Bamford Show_ allowed Bamford to openly acknowledge her bipolar diagnosis and show that being “sick” is not intrinsically at odds with creating meaningful work. Like Pope, and Taylor, the emotional resonance of Bamford’s work is heightened by the voyeuristic tension between the personal and the performed, which challenges the audience to constantly assess their own reading of and relationship to the material.

Bamford is not the only comic in the alternative scene to leverage the tension between her personal life and performances to embody notions of cruel optimism. The late Brody Stevens often played the part of the hopeful capitalist consumer in his jokes, despite the fact that (or perhaps _because_) his mental health was often at odds with his real, aggressive pursuit of “success” and his failed desires to own property, achieve fame and regulate his emotions.[^16] The audience laughs hardest at the moments in between jokes where he questions their reactions to his vulnerability, which forces them to reflect on the context of that laugh. For example, during a performance at LA’s The Comedy Store, Stevens asks the audience to watch and see how flexible he is. Wearing loose-fitting athletic clothes, he bends over at his waist with a confident posture and begins to punch the ground at his feet with braggadocious male energy before declaring, “I cried on Magnolia \[Street\].” Overtop of the audience’s laughter, Stevens goes on to say, suddenly quite solemnly, “I had a breakdown and I couldn’t let my mother on to it.”[^17] The heaviness of this confessional statement in contrast to the stereotypically male energy that preceded it provokes laughter from an audience that isn’t sure what to believe or how to feel. Stevens’s development of the uncomfortable in-between spaces forces the audience to constantly assess if he has dismantled the facade of a performative breakdown to reveal an actual one.

In a _New Yorker_ article, Hua Hsu connects notions of narrativity to cruel optimism in the age of anxiety: “We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author.”[^18] If we are the authors of our own lives, then when we reach our final acts, everything will be okay: this is the fallacy of the neoliberal “good life.” Stevens, Bamford and Pope subvert the idea that they are blindly participating in such a pursuit by constantly calling the form of comedy itself into question, often breaking the fourth wall as a way of challenging society’s invisible structures. The tragicomic turn in performance art defies the emotional regulation that is a feature of modern western society, demonstrating how embracing a less categorical, more pluralistic subjectivity might mitigate the slow death caused by neoliberal capitalism. Whether or not this critique is conscious or unconscious almost hardly matters. In an artist statement, Pope cites Freud’s idea that “freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom,”[^19] a succinct proclamation that illustrates the power of comedy’s capacity to resist oppressive forces by laughing in the face of them.

[^1]: _WATERSNAKE_ was organized by Katie Lyle on September 15, 2019\. Set in a residential backyard, the one-day exhibition featured a solo presentation of site-responsive works by Sara Kay Maston, with a performance by Kathleen Taylor, and a reading by Benjamin de Boer.
[^2]: Kathleen Taylor, description of _She-Orc_ (2019), _Second Spring_ online catalogue, VIVO Media Arts Centre; [vivomediaarts.com/programming/exhibition/second-spring](http://vivomediaarts.com/programming/exhibition/second-spring)
[^3]: Lauren Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[^4]: Berlant, 7.
[^5]: Berlant, 1.
[^6]: Doored TV, “Doored 24 (complete show with audio!),” April 26, 2016; [youtu.be/81CD8oFJXS8?t=4016](https://youtu.be/81CD8oFJXS8?t=4016)
[^7]: Doored TV.
[^8]: Chris Hampton, “Because Life Is Absurd, This Artist Decided to Become a Clown,” CBC Arts (November 30, 2017); [cbc.ca/arts/because-life-is-absurdthis-artist-decided-to%20become-aclown-1.4425463](https://www.cbc.ca/arts/because-life-is-absurdthis-artist-decided-to%20become-aclown-1.4425463)
[^9]: Read Me, _Love Me, Leave Me: Toronto Art Book Fair_ (Toronto Biennial of Art, November 3, 2019), event program, [torontobiennial.org/programs/read-me-love-me-leave-me-toronto-art-book-fair/](https://torontobiennial.org/programs/read-me-love-me-leave-me-toronto-art-book-fair/)
[^10]: Cotey Pope, “The Cotey Show,” Vimeo, June 13, 2018.
[^11]: “About,” Doored, [doored.tv/contact/](http://doored.tv/contact/)
[^12]: See: [christinacatherine.info/aesthetical-relations](http://christinacatherine.info/aesthetical-relations)
[^13]: Sara Corbett, “The Weird, Scary and Ingenious Brain of Maria Bamford,” _The New York Times_, July 17, 2014, [nytimes.com/2014/07/20/magazine/the-weird-scary-and-ingenious-brain-of-maria-bamford.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/magazine/the-weird-scary-and-ingenious-brain-of-maria-bamford.html)
[^14]: David Harvey, _Spaces of Hope_ (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 106.
[^15]: Berlant, 95.
[^16]: Ideas from this text, especially those pertaining to Brody Stevens, were espoused in the artist book _As you can see, most of my pictures are lies by mistake_ featured in the exhibition _remember when we were together forever_, curated by Roberta Pelan at Cassandra Cassandra, Toronto between January 26 and March 1, 2020.
[^17]: _Brody Stevens: Enjoy It!_ Episode 1, “Brody Stevens, Who Are You?” Comedy Central, aired December 1, 2013\. Clip starts at 9:00.
[^18]: Hua Hsu, “Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety,” _The New Yorker_ (June 25, 2019), [newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/affect-theory-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/affect-theory-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety)
[^19]: Sigmund Freud, _The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud Volume 8 (1905): Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious_ (London: Hogarth Press, 1960).

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Drawing a relationship between performance art and alternative comedy, Parker Kay examines the sometimes ambiguous territory between the performed and the personal, applying tragicomedy as a means of defying emotional regulation under neoliberal capitalism through its appeal for more pluralistic and nuanced subjectivities.

Tragicomedy, a Toolkit

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In a discussion with Paul Chaat Smith, New Red Order describes using their position as informants to broker power, building an entire practice around complicating the performative nature of land acknowledgements, and other unidimensional “efforts” at social change.

New Red Order Wants You — In Conversation with NRO: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys

Letter

##### Dear Reader,

Before you turn the page to find yourself inside this issue, we wanted to briefly share a few things about how we—Kate Monro, Publisher; Jaclyn Bruneau, Editor (the extent of _C Magazine’s_ full-time staff); and, the board’s Equity Committee, Karie Liao, Annie Wong, and Vicky Wong—have been reflecting on this moment: unto itself, and as it pertains to our organization’s ongoing efforts towards anti-oppression, equity, and inclusion, and the ways we want and need to grow. Racism, especially anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, is a problem across the world, including in Canada and in our nation’s art sector. You’ve likely heard this too many times to count in past weeks, but we see the repetition of this acknowledgement as part of ensuring that it can never again be ignored. 

Our content is a mix of pitched and solicited, and that ratio fluctuates from issue to issue. It’s important to us to post an open call, to invite people to think with us and to take us down roads we didn’t know existed. However, to this day we are still receiving a majority of pitches from white contributors and about white artists and discourses—yet we know that this is not for lack of talent, interest, and promise from BIPOC writers. While we do a significant amount of solicitation and mentorship to ensure that each issue includes a more representative cross-section of our community, that doesn’t really get at the root cause. Over the past five years, this has stimulated much discussion internally, and gradual efforts externally, to try and address it—namely through our Experiments in Criticism program, guest edited issues, and editorial advisory. Particularly in light of the powerful push for fair representation in the culture industry of late, why aren’t we hearing from a more diverse group of folks? 

One part of the answer is that the majority of discourses pertaining to contemporary art and its historical canon have been informed by and continue to uphold Western European thought, values, and practices, systematically excluding non-Western worldviews, ideas and artistic expressions. This, despite that Europe is but one continent of the world among six others whose many peoples live in Canada and participate in its art world. While this may elucidate the foundation of the problem, there are practical barriers that need to be overcome in order to truly upend it. Emerging BIPOC critics must be encouraged to pursue art writing by instructors, and offered pathways to publishing by people further along in their careers to the same degree that their white counterparts are. Art publishing must ensure a culturally sensitive, safe, and productive forum in which BIPOC critics can develop, articulate and share their ideas. The precarious, inconsistent, and often modestly compensated nature of the opportunities that make it impossible to even imagine pursuing art writing—particularly for those who don’t have financial safety nets—must be rethought. 

This is all part of what we—the expanded “we” now, including us as well as our peers in publishing, academia, artist-run centres, and public museums—need to do to decentre whiteness and usher in these unheard or underheard voices. It’s not about simply meeting a quota; numbers are relatively easy compared to the real, challenging tasks of capacity-building and cultivating diverse leadership. To this end, we previously worked with our board to introduce an Accessibility Policy and organizational equity goals, and more recently, with our aforementioned dedicated, permanent, and generous Equity Committee who worked steadfastly on our Equity Policy and Affirmative Action Procedures (all of which can be accessed online at equity.cmagazine.com) and continue to support our pursuits, helping define goals that are achievable given our financial and human resources. 

We are currently incubating a few initiatives that will increase mentorship opportunities for BIPOC writers and editors, and more strongly support the close, care-full, critical, and constructive advancement of discourses surrounding BIPOC artistic practices and thought, by BIPOC and white writers alike. We will maintain and continue increasing the representation of equity-seeking groups across all of our operations, including on our staff, board of directors, and editorial advisory, and ensure anti-oppression principles are taught, developed, and made default in all decision-making, communications, and administrative processes. Frankly, we aren’t interested in a _C Magazine_ that doesn’t centre this work. 

We call upon all of our peers to commit to anti-racism and to take to heart these words by Angela Davis: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” 

Thank you for your continued interest in the magazine, and for your patience as we plot. We remain open to constructive criticism, as always. 

Our thoughts are with our Black and Indigenous contributors and colleagues—past, present, and future—during this time. 

##### Sincerely, and in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,   
Kate Monro and Jaclyn Bruneau 

Editor

Publisher

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On behalf of the _C Magazine_ staff and its Equity Committee, Editor Jaclyn Bruneau reflects on the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations as they pertain to the organization’s ongoing efforts towards anti-oppression, equity and inclusion.

Letter to the Reader

Dallas Fellini is a writer, curator, and artist living and working in Tkaronto.

Henry Heng Lu is a curator, artist and programmer based in Vancouver and Toronto. He is interested in fostering dialogues that engage multigenerational artistic practices in a cross-cultural context.

##### Dear C,

I’m a young writer who has recently entered the field, but already feel demoralized by an exponentially-expanding list of personal grievances I have about art criticism. Reading issue 145, I was reassured to see that many other writers shared my grievances, despite all the supposed progress in the field. 

In the editorial note, Merray Gerges contextualized these grievances by posing the question: “is visibility directly proportionate to power?” The International Transgender Day of Visibility just recently passed, which reminds me of the times I’ve seen words like “visibility” and “diversity” paraded around by institutions in place of the actual work needed to produce meaningful structural change. I feel similarly about the so-called progress that has been made in the field of art criticism, which has left marginalized artists exhausted with the idea of being seen, and instead desperately wishing to be _heard_. 

When presented with Kim Dhillon’s question, “if the colonial model for art criticism didn’t exist… what else might be possible?,” I’m overwhelmed with potentialities. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a work.shop with David Balzer as a part of _C_’s “Experiments in Criticism” series, in which we worked together to generate “uncoupling strategies” for separating unattractive aspects of the art world from our writing as emerging critics. For me, the most overbearing one is the colonial, hierarchical assignment of value that art criticism is based upon, which is the reason most art writing follows, embellishes or responds to a work, rather than coexisting non-hierarchically with it. 

I’ve been ruminating on what an alternative to this structure would look like, and have started to develop a project that focuses on promoting dialogue between artists and art writers, using storytelling and skill-sharing. I’m hop.ing that this will allow for a more honest and conversational approach to art criticism, and help ease my own weariness navigating a field with a history so deeply rooted in hierarchy. 

##### Dallas Fellini

##### Dear C Mag,

Esmé Hogeveen and Emma Sharpe’s “Tell Us What You _Really_ Think” and Casey Beal’s “The Limits of Empathy: Criticism and Editing Across Borders” latched into my memory long after finishing C145. In approaching criticism from both ends of the editorial desk, so to speak, these two features brought to mind Helena Reckitt’s article on the emotional labour of curating, which clearly extends to writing and editing as well. For white editors especially, empathy needs to be rooted in the willingness to admit that one’s own experience and world view is not immune to error, otherwise one may continue perpetuating colonial behaviour under the guise of “linguistic purism,” as de.scribed by Beal. In continuing to reflect on the ways privilege manifests in this work, and this time thinking about certain responses Hogeveen and Sharpe’s survey, I found myself wondering to what extent I would be willing to forge my genuine reaction to an exhibition or piece of writing for the sake of cultivating a potential professional connection—a choice not everyone is at liberty to make. 

Art criticism today, as Hogeveen, Sharpe and especially Beal remind us, is about challenging and dismantling the existing power structures that dictate _who_ can perform the emotional labour of art writing and _how_; the authors continue the conversation where Amy Fung’s _Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being_ left off. The Baudelairean image of the critic is long dead and buried in these two features, as well as in issue 145 as a whole, which functions as a periodic reminder that art is not and _cannot_ be apolitical, particularly for people in the back. 

##### Margaryta Golovchenko 

##### Hi C Mag, 

When I was still seeking a place in the art world as a writer, I was constantly reminded of the need to be clear and careful; to read between the lines; to follow the protocols; and, to put myself into others’ shoes (but can you always, or should you at all?—something Casey Beal explores in C145). The last issue made me think about how to transition my mind from trying to find answers to “How can I talk about it?” to figuring out “How can we better understand each other?” 

I found comfort and resonance in Joana Joachim’s words in “Curating, Criticism and Care, or, ‘Showing Up’ as Praxis,” when she points out the lack of sincerity and sustained efforts of predominantly white art institutions to effect structural changes for BIPOC workers, who do not need institutions to celebrate their identities—nor do artists. Superficial representation, which is only implemented to fulfil “diversity” agendas, hinders meaningful, informed conversations and the criticality (which is often preemptively avoided for safety) necessary for the healthy growth of BIPOC practices. To be clear, this criticality should not be used to justify shallow, unsupported analysis nor to attack works rooted in sensibilities and cultural backgrounds not shared by the writer or speaker. 

May we all—as writers, critics, editors, publishers, viewers and readers— imagine and contribute to a better ecology that is more complicated for the information, knowledge production and distribution of BIPOC artistic practices. 

##### Henry Heng Lu 

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Letters reflecting on C145 CRITICISM, AGAIN.

Letters

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Artist Project

Aliya Pabani is an artist and independent audio producer in Toronto.

There’s a category of viral videos depicting elementary school teachers greeting their students with a consent exercise. From options posted on the wall—hug, handshake, high five, fist bump—kids can tap the way they want the teacher to greet them, demonstrating that they can navigate the ambiguous terrain of intimacy if it’s appropriately distilled. But the experiential learning-through-reflection-on-doing that’s seen as essential for nurturing comfort, confidence and creativity in children is rarely accommodated in adult life. With the conviction that adults need what children need, Lisa Smolkin posted greeting options inside a series of high-saturation graphic splotches outside her studio and welcomed audience members to select one before entering.

One of the most famous instances of the splotch is Nickelodeon’s logo, created in 1984, shortly after they acquired the Canadian sketch comedy show _You Can’t Do That on Television_. The cast was all kids, and one recurring gag came to define the show: when a kid said the words “I don’t know,” they would be drenched in green slime. Nickelodeon’s former creative director said that the sliming was meant to portray a child’s shame at failing to meet adult expectations. The popularity of this moment compelled the company to release Nickelodeon Compounds, the first toy series to focus solely on exploring slime’s tactile qualities. One example, Gak, was known for its sour, oyster-y smell, and the fact that it somehow felt wet and cold, despite being neither. Both repulsive and addictive, slime is a sort of transgressive substance. Flattened into an educational graphic, it becomes a splotch, and signals the presence of covert dynamics that lie just outside the immediate frame, like counternarratives or “fun facts.” It’s an interjection that troubles the space, but in a manageable way.

For this performance in Smolkin’s studio, a series of pseudo-museological exhibits were laid out that vaguely referenced stages of human development. She activated the installation in the role of a hapless guide, mining each one for insights on nature versus nurture in an attempt to figure out how much influence we have over the person we become. She approaches a lifelike toddler doll lying on a sheepskin with a Richard Scarry hardcover propped open beside it, and introduces the common developmental concept of mirroring, which involves imitating an infant’s expressions to help them develop self-awareness and empathy, and invites the audience to try it: “You are feeling content, aren’t you? You like your book. Good luck with your development, baby!”

Nearby, a rudimentary, stuffed, faceless human figure wearing a Star of David necklace sits with its arms crossed. There’s a decal of an anime face with a muted expression of sadness on the wall beside it. The audience is told that the person has suffered their first professional disappointment. The scene, which signals an incursion of autobiographical elements into the diagrammatic space, references Smolkin’s childhood experience of being rejected from the National Ballet Summer School and the imprint of generational trauma. She goes on to speak from the perspective of a snowboard, invoking Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s work _Bad Ideas for Paradise_ (2001) on the nonchalance of skaters: “Hey bro. What’s up buddy? I’m sports equipment. I’m a snowboard. I don’t waste time with concepts like anxiety, trauma, social insecurity or hierarchies. I have not been crushed by life. I am crushing life.” Accordingly, a wall chart behind it displays a brainstorm of one of Smolkin’s preoccupations: the difference between an “Alpha Life” and “Beta Life,” and in one of her videos, the splotch reappears on a “Life Success Formula,” with the words “Generational Wealth?” inside.

Smolkin bought an overpriced creamy matte pink travel bowl and water container set, that looked like it could have been featured on Goop, before going to Banff, hoping that the objects’ elegance would somehow enhance the experience. Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow called her company Goop because it meant nothing and could mean anything—an amorphous substance representing endless possibility. The containers sit on a plinth with a sign for Paltrow’s Netflix series, _The Goop Lab_, crassly stamped with the word “EXTREME,” which seems redundant because the show already involves trying out wellness trends like psychedelic treatments and cold-exposure therapy. But maybe Smolkin is proposing a kind of Goop accelerationism, where only the outer, outer limits of treatment can release a person from the compulsory stewardship of an addled, individualized self.

Though satirizing wellness culture has become cliché, Smolkin deploys self-parody to implicate herself as she considers how a desire for self-actualization butts up against the realities of social hierarchy, in the manner of a child giving a presentation. At turns sincere and absurd, it’s funny in part because we’re unable to locate Smolkin in the performance. But that ambiguity facilitates a more empathic spectatorship: whoever she is, we’re rooting for her.

She concludes by spilling a sinewy blue liquid onto the floor and scanning it with her phone: “Oh my god! My DNA is spilling out of my body. Another splotch! Let me analyze it … I’M OKAY!”

—Aliya Pabani

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Performance

Psychology

Accompanying text by Aliya Pabani for Say “Hi,” an artist project by Lisa Smolkin, commissioned for this issue and performed for the camera and a live audience at The Banff Centre, twists up a simultaneously satirical and earnest comment on self-actualization as it relates to early childhood development, extreme wellness culture, insecurity and social hierarchies.

Say "Hi" by Lisa Smolkin: Text

Artist

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Commissioned for this issue and performed for the camera and a live audience at The Banff Centre, _Say Hi_ twists up a simultaneously satirical and earnest comment on self-actualization as it relates to early childhood development, extreme wellness culture, insecurity and social hierarchies. Accompanying text by Aliya Pabani.

Say "Hi"

Review

In the exhibition _Condolere Sanctuaries_, Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Eve Tagny converted Centre CLARK’s Room 2 into a multi-sensory garden refuge. “Condolere” in late Latin translates to “suffer together” and in this context alludes to the garden’s potential as a site for reparative healing. Refugia, or places of refuge, referenced in the work of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are the ecological areas in which species regenerate following catastrophic events. The cultivated garden, as an extension of and expansion upon the private domicile, is a refuge for the body, memory and identity. In this way, Tagny’s installations in _Condolere Sanctuaries_ offered a similarly resurgent potential in response to contemporary and historical trauma. The garden as refuge, however, presents a paradox, since places are cultivated not from a void, but rather from specific socio-political contexts. The garden is a healing space and also a site of historical trauma with psychological and material traces requiring criticality. 

To enter, visitors passed under the room’s arched doorway and looked up to see a photograph of dense tropical foliage installed on the archway’s walled underside. Directly across the gallery on the opposing wall, Tagny installed a proportional wooden archway with a similar photographic treatment, creating the illusion of an expanded garden. Positioned against the middle of the gallery’s right wall sat a life-sized but structurally unsound clay staircase. The doorway and staircase extended the space into the imaginary, unbounded by the gallery’s brick and mortar. Yet the precarity of that expanded realm was emphasized by the doorway’s impenetrable vegetation and the earthen staircase’s instability. Such architectural additions delineated the exhibition space as much as they elaborated on it, revealing how tending to a garden is also an imposition of the gardener’s will. 

Tagny’s careful attention to the exhibition’s garden refuge was noticeable in the various flora-inspired objects affixed to walls, resting on clay structures and lying on the gallery floor. Hybrid organic-inorganic forms were object assemblages made of flower, stem, rock, tropical leaf, fruit, glass, decorative metal clip, metal nail and printed photograph. Suspended semi-translucent plastic sheeting made secondary walls that partially obscured the hybrid objects that lay behind them. This refuge was the result of discernible human intervention and had indeterminate surroundings.

The absence of wall labels, including work titles, heightened the holistic, terrestrial nature of Tagny’s exhibition. A silent video was projected on a floor-based semicircular clay structure with a rectangular base. Filmed in a garden in Johannesburg, South Africa, the video features quick transitions of superimposed scenes. The smaller foregrounded scenes are of a sun-filled private garden of abundant green foliage in which a woman tends to laundry drying on a clothesline, the care of a child and the covering of a shrub with plastic sheeting. These scenes are layered over the video’s larger, abstract background image of warm-orange and cool-blue tones, suggestive of a landscape. The garden in the video is utilitarian in facilitating household tasks—an earthly paradise in its dense tropical vegetation, but also unsettled by the inclusion of the plastic sheeting. Is the plastic to protect the garden’s flora from an unspecified danger? Or, does the plastic’s opacity refer to an unrevealed past particular to this location? How is this garden, and its potential traces of psychological and material trauma, connected to Johannesburg’s history? The garden as refuge is thus complicated by unearthed and buried histories, specific to geographical place. In this way, _Tagny’s Condolere Sanctuaries_ aligns with Tsing’s ecological understanding of refugia as generative areas of resurgence following catastrophic events. 

A second video work, also on the floor, played on a monitor beside a dried tropical flower. The video begins with a daytime scene of a lush garden adjacent to a white-walled building, along which a dog roams back and forth, in and out of view. Another scene within a smaller, square frame quickly appears, superimposed upon the garden, featuring a young Black woman wearing a white dress and bathed in ethereal light. The woman’s hands tenderly hold and release crumbling earth, feel and embrace the corresponding hand, wrist and forearm in self-touch, gesturing outward in repetitive dancerly formations. The work alternates between the woman and the garden and includes a text-based account of a garden’s history. A selection reads: “I remember / How much you loved nurturing our garden / But one day / As the sun was setting down / You took a clothing line there / Tied a noose.” Together, Tagny’s video works speak to each other in shared narrative. With the garden’s clothesline con.nected both to household ritual and personal trauma, the paradox of the garden refuge is made explicit. 

A quiet permeated Tagny’s multi-sensory _Condolere Sanctuaries_. The quiet reinforced the garden’s reparative healing potential and complex site-specific history. It also suggested an aesthetic that Black cultural and literary scholar Kevin Quashie attributes to an expression of selfhood. For Quashie, in-teriority manifests as a quiet presence; it is not absent of sound. Interiority’s socio-political capacity is not diminished by quiet—instead, the possibility of an expanded expression of culture and subjecthood is amplified through the vastness of inner life. The dancerly hand gestures in Tagny’s video are the material and metaphorical embodiment of Quashie’s “aesthetic of quiet,” as evocative as the spoken word, if not more so. In _Condolere Sanctuaries_, Tagny’s examination of the garden as paradoxical refuge calls attention to living in the aftermath of trauma and offers new schemas for reparative healing that mirror Quashie’s positioning of interiority as equally substantive to public expressions of socio-political resistance.

[^1]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer, academic and musician and a member ofAlderville First Nation. Her novel, Noopiming: A Cure For White Ladies will be released this September by House of Anansi Press. 

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Ashley Raghubir reviews Eve Tagny’s exhibition, _Condolere Sanctuaries_, at Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK, Montreal.

Condolere Sanctuaries: Eve Tagny

Natasha Chaykowski is a writer and curator based on Treaty 7 Territory in Calgary. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.

“It’s one thing to panic about uncertain futures.”  
—Bridget Moser

The actual weight of the world is 13,170,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000 pounds and that is a load that an average human being can’t really comprehend. (As if there is such a thing as an average human being, or an average anything right now, or ever.) But what we can know is that the gravitational impact of hypothetically holding such a weight on one’s own shoulders would surely necessitate some serious physical and non-physical therapy. And while of late there is certainly an accumulation of things to be disoriented and weighed down by, I have nonetheless continued to send emails, which I have begun to uniformly sign with a resigned “Stay safe and love your loved ones and yourself.” It’s better than “I hope this note finds you well” but a far cry from “Yours, in this ongoing collective effort to dismantle a system of incomprehensible violence.”

Sometimes and especially these days, when I watch something made by Bridget Moser, I say aloud to myself: what is she doing and why does it make me feel like this? I mean: when I encounter her hands manipulating a set of rose-coloured rubber lips, and soft, shifting, droning tones play in the background, the sonic equivalent of the way a horizon slides imperceptibly from bright yellow and blue to brilliant orange and purple, a slide we take for granted because some- times it’s normal, and those lips speak a script in a disembodied, robotized voice (probably the artist’s?) and say things like “I don’t know what I’m doing” and “It’s just a feeling I’d like to have” and “I am more than a purposeless body waiting for eventual death”—when I encounter this, why do I want to sob, to unleash a kind of cosmic scream that can’t be perceived as a sound wave, to be suspended in a dark ether of peace, eyes closed, surrounded by specks of light? I don’t really have an answer. But a friend once told me that Bridget is like a prophet of our generation, and I believe him. I guess it doesn’t really matter why cooked spaghetti hanging out of a vase and being braided as Enya’s “Storms in Africa” (1988) plays makes me feel this way, but it feels important that it makes me feel. “I don’t know what I’m feeling but I’m feeling something,” Bridget says.

I’m not going to refer to Bridget by her last name here, because it seems disingenuous. If you’re reading this, you probably know her or at least know of her work. And now, the rules we’ve abided by seem to hold little authority. You could stop reading this right now and instead go watch Bridget’s video online (confirmation, perhaps, that both galleries and art reviews were never really necessary, like so much else), as the Remai Modern didn’t open Bridget’s show because of this pandemic. Such an erosion of orthodoxy feels to me like the sensation of teeth shifting back, yearning for the places they belong, their rightful crooked spots, gnarled before they endured a decade of braces. I’m not sure why, but throughout Bridget’s new video there are acrylic resin teeth strewn about, usually in the company of fake nails with a French manicure and light-pink earplugs, sometimes as part of a still life, sometimes being poured out of a white dolomite conch shell. These piles of parts are for me an ethereal reminder that parts of ourselves will one day be strewn about—broadcast minerals accruing in a river basin or muscle matter and body fat enriching the soil—and that it is inaccurate to think of the calcium that constitutes our bones as belonging to us.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I don’t know why I’m still writing emails, but I think maybe Bridget is always speculating about such things. The lips move and they narrate my recent days: “I take showers just to pass the time”; “When I’m this lonely, I start getting intimate with all the furniture in the house.” She made this work months ago. If a prophet is a kind of “inspired teacher,” an intermediary between us and the vast expanse of the sublime unknown, that dark ether of peace that we don’t know anything about and that we don’t have a word for, but that I call magic, then maybe Bridget really is like a prophet. “We’re living on this meaningless island, and I think it’s getting sick. Maybe it’s already very unwell,” she says. Yes, all of our crops are dying. Yet we persist. Now the task is to ensure that this persistence isn’t in vain, because one day we will not carry the weight of the world but instead be among the many parts that constitute it. Actually, of course, we already are.

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Natasha Chaykowski reviews Bridget Moser’s exhibition, _My Crops Are Dying But My Body Persists_, at Remai Modern, Saskatoon. 

My Crops are Dying But My Body Persists: Bridget Moser

Christina Hajjar is a queer femme first-generation Lebanese-Canadian artist, writer and organizer based in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory and Homeland of the Métis Nation. [christinahajjar.com](http://christinahajjar.com) and @garbagebagprincess

I didn’t expect to like this book. I expected _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ (2019) to be somewhat of an inside joke that didn’t land, that I should have been in on. A collection of essays, testimonials, scripts, letters and images, _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ documents the travelling performance installation and lesbian-feminist haunted house _Killjoy’s Kastle_, created by artists Allyson Mitchell and her collaborator Deirdre Logue. As a feminist killjoy myself, an artist and writer, a genderfluid Arab femme dyke, a millennial queer, and a women’s and gender studies graduate, I approached this book with caution.

I briefly learned about the kastle in a feminist cultural productions class as an awakening feminist and artist. The maximalist, craftivist, immersive approach had impressed me but I was also turned off, because another student I respected spoke out about the harmful nature of the kastle’s Ball Busta room, identified by multiple _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ contributors as the most controversial aspect of the kastle. The Ball Busta room involved two butch-dyke performers in plaid shirts smashing plaster of Paris balls modelled after truck nuts. The kastle’s guides (the Demented Women’s Studies Professors) used scripts which involved an explanation that the “ball-busting dykes” were smashing the patriarchy. Many trans people, people of colour and allies spoke out about the triggering and offensive nature of this and other aspects of the kastle—such as a white performer in dreads and a general lack of representation—which was followed by a Toronto (2013) and Los Angeles (2015) Facebook response by Mitchell and Logue, included in the book.

Returning to _Killjoy’s Kastle_ years later, with many more tools for nuanced engagement, I think more about the complexities of the kastle and its archive, collectivity, labour, generational divides, what constitutes transparent communication, accountability and the impact of a project on an affective, experiential level. While _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ speaks to the dearth of lesbian and feminist archives, both the kastle and the book act as a collective archive, presenting past happenings through the perspective of multiple contributors, and offering new forms of material engagement.

_Killjoy’s Kastle_ embodies the contradictions of inciting nostalgia while also encouraging critique. The kastle mirrors back the viewer’s subjectivity, which is to say I assume some older lesbians experiencing the work felt nostalgia, while others felt challenged; and some younger queers felt defensive, while others revelled in the experience. Mainstream second-wave feminism is often known for its cis-ness and whiteness, for being anti-sex, anti-sex worker and transphobic. Contemporary queers are familiar with and use the phrase “no TERFS, no SWERFS,” meaning they don’t stand for trans-exclusionary radical “feminists” and sex-worker-exclusionary radical “feminists.” These slogans signal politics, but also speak to the systemic oppression that has been perpetuated from the previous generation. I want spaces to feel safe for the most marginalized people: that is what feminism means to me—anti-oppression. That is what being a killjoy means to me: disrupting the joy fostered by normative spaces, even if that means unsettling or burning bridges with other feminists and queers.

_Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ functions like the kastle itself, creating a collective space for thinkers and makers contending with lesbian and feminist history, teaching something through the process of this creation, and invoking critical engagement for those who witness (in this case, read) it. The book’s aesthetic is high quality with a bold graphic design. It is easy to navigate, colourful, image heavy and cohesive—impressive given the lack of funds for professional photography and the amount of image contributors listed in the book. Though _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle_ certainly can’t be as immersive as the kastle itself, the book relates conflict at an engaging pace, inclining the reader to go faster to see what happens next, like a juicy drama. At the same time, the multiple perspectives and controversies forced me to slow down and absorb details in order to more fully engage.

Contributor Ann Cvetkovich, one of the Real-Life Feminist Killjoys who worked in the Processing Room at the end of the kastle, speaks in the book of the lack of time for more meaningful engagement with visitors, and the ways she struggled or failed as a facilitator. Cvetkovich’s piece comes more than halfway through the book. After reading several accounts about the importance and opportunity of the Processing Room in unpacking visitors’ experiences, Cvetkovich’s perspective made me question the effectiveness of it. If Mitchell and Logue are intentionally seeking to pervert and provoke through humorous and disturbing depictions of stereotypes and histories, to what extent are they accountable to the affective responses to such a work? Put simply: what does identity based art owe to those whom it claims to represent, and how do its viewers contend with that?

In their introduction, Mitchell and Cait McKinney state that the book “uses _Killjoy’s Kastle_ to ask what kinds of remainders lesbian feminism leaves when its specific iterations become untimely and then die. How does it haunt, and what do we do with these old ghosts?” The kastle is going to be inherently problematic because, as an artwork, it asks us to confront the hauntings of the past. As Heather Love points out, the “I’m with problematic” tie-dyed T-shirt for sale in the kastle’s gift shop suggests an inevitable proximity to that which it seems to mock. “It acknowledges complicity and impurity and suggests that, since stereotypes are inevitable, we might engage them rather than disavow them or try to clean them up.”

I am left with a sense of conviction—not about whether _Killjoy’s Kastle_ was right or wrong, problematic or pure, successful or failed, but about the ways that art creates alternate and essential—albeit at times difficult—modes of engagement. Just as I am called to be a feminist killjoy, I am also called to “lesbian hardcore processing,” as the kastle encourages. I am compelled by the stickiness of both/and rather than either/ or. I was, perhaps, most convinced by Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s assertion in the book: “When we dream of a totalizing politics, and when we dream of spaces that might manifest those totalized politics as whole and healing formations, we will always be disappointed.” 

Tompkins asks: “Do we always have to slaughter our mothers? And, at another level, can feminist thinking and feminist movement learn to get out of the political way or engage differently when it is time to learn from emergent or long-suppressed or traumatized ideas and formations?”

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Christina Hajjar reviews the book _Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings_ (2019) by Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney, published by UBC Press. 

Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings: Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney

Hiba Ali is a digital artist, educator, scholar, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, Austin and Toronto. Her research concerns surveillance, womxn of colour and labour.

I met Sajdeep Soomal, curator of the exhibition _Architecture after the Asylum_, at Toronto’s Trinity Square Video, as he gave a tour and discussed architecture and psychiatry. “Psychiatry decides if you are sane or insane based on your ability to produce a coherent narrative,” Soomal explained as he invited me in. “I knew that this project about psychiatry needed to be situated in the contemporary art world because that is where people have long refused and subverted traditional narrative modes in favour of imaginative, non-narrative takes on living in this crazy-making world.” The exhibition proposed a new concept to understand the relationship between space and mental health: mad building syndrome (MBS), which plays on the term sick building syndrome (SBS). Just as SBS is a condition where buildings make people who live or work in them sick, so MBS is a condition of a broken world, with madness as a normal bodily reaction to unhealthy living conditions, architecture designed to contain and control, and toxic environments. The five projects featured in the exhibition expanded our understanding of MBS by considering public ideas around safety, infrastructure, legibility and freedom. 

I began with _Madlove: A Designer Asylum_, which featured a series of comic book profiles that showcased “what a good mental health day looks, feels and tastes like” for a few people with varying mental-health experiences. The comic book profiles came out of workshops designed by UK-based duo Hannah Hull and James Leadbitter and featured drawings of participants such as Iris, who describes her perfect day at the asylum as meditating, watching TV, hearing a motivational speech and going on a shopping spree with her best friend. Importantly, in order for Iris’s perfect day to materialize, she cannot be locked in an asylum. Addressing the limits of carceral psychiatry, _Madlove_ calls for an end to asylum walls. At the same time, it is an easy entry point for viewers to consider   
the legitimacy and legibility of madness, and to see how the perfect day for the sane and insane don’t look so different. 

Joe Wood’s two-part installation, part of a two-part project called _ᑯᐦᐹᑌᔨᑖᑯᓯᐃᐧᐣ | \_kohpâteyitâkosiwin – the act of being thought of as contemptible_, filled a wall to the left of _Madlove_. Here, tiled, wheat-pasted documents featured Wood’s psychological history of being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and her challenging adolescence spent in abusive, transphobic foster care as part of the Sixties Scoop, a Canadian genocidal policy from the ’50s to the ’80s that stole Indigenous children from their communities and placed them in foster homes. Asserting her agency and rebuking the institution of settler psychiatry, Wood marks up and redacts comments in medical documents obtained from Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) that belittle, mitigate, control and attempt to make legible her trans identity. During her time in foster care, Wood remembers climbing trees to seek refuge, and at the centre of the gallery there was a sculpture of cupped paper hands that looked like branches, onto which was projected footage of leaves rustling in the wind—holding us in witness of Wood’s experiences as she moved through different psychiatric institutions and foster care. 

Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam and Rupali Mozaria’s video installation _How We Cared_ paid homage to Ponnambalam’s uncle, Pandi Kumaraswamy, who encouraged Ponnambalam to become an artist. In the work, effectively a moving digital collage appearing in fragments, there were three sites of care: forced care (psychiatric institutions in Canada and India), natural care (Kurthalam Falls, a sacred healing site in South Asia) and creative care (Kumaraswamy’s own apartment). Images—from family albums and factory maps, and of South Indian Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai—serve as a mental map of spaces that link Ponnambalam and Kumaraswamy, illustrating psychological spaces of migration, labour and British colonialism. At one point, we see Kumaraswamy, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and gender dysphoria, turn the camera on himself in the solace of his apartment to document his domestic surroundings against the Toronto skyline. The apartment becomes Kumaraswamy’s site of freedom, where he is able to express himself as an artist. Working with Mozaria, a graphic artist, Ponnambalam stressed natural, creative forms of care within a fluid ecosystem spanning medical, spiritual and natural worlds. 

In Portland-based artist ariella tai’s two-channel installation, featuring the videos _not alone_ and _safehouse ii_, she considered the role of architecture and Black madness. In _not alone_, tai rearranges the 2003 psychiatric horror film _Gothika_, which follows a psychiatrist played by Halle Berry who finds herself trapped in a women’s mental-health hospital after she is accused of killing her husband. tai edits the film—in which a light-skinned Black woman enacts trauma narratives for the white gaze—so that Berry begins on the cold tiles of the asylum’s open showers and then ends up in the privacy of her home’s bathtub, thereby exorcising the ghosts of whiteness haunting her character. In _safehouse ii_, a group of people autonomously bathe, garden and cook in their domestic spaces. Centring Black, queer and trans experiences, _safehouse ii_ shows its subjects relaxed and carefree, away from the colonial, psychiatric gaze. It’s a much-needed intervention: whereas institutions tend to position Black people within frames of carcerality, tai considers what healing can look like for those outside of a psychiatric lens. As part of the exhibition, tai led a workshop, “The Cinematic Archives of Black Madness,” which addressed films such as _Gothika_, _Shock Corridor_ (1963) and _The Caveman’s Valentine_ (2001), exploring Black madness through cinematic technique and opening up an interpretation of the films to a non-normative representation of Black consciousness and cognition. 

I took a stack of postcards with me as I left the gallery. The postcards listed out various psychiatric diagnoses, from bipolar disorder to gender dysphoria to depression, and were headlined either “Healthy Responses to Patriarchy” or “Healthy Responses to Capitalism.” Stylized like health-awareness posters, these postcards asked us to reflect on the ways that madness is authorized by our environments. While psychiatry continues to use brutal methods such as incarceration, electroconvulsive therapy, forced labour and Freudian psychanalysis to “correct the mind,” the exhibition pointed outward instead, asking us to let our minds run wild in an attempt to correct the carceral, genocidal infrastructures of settler-colonial society. 

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Hiba Ali reviews the exhibition _Architecture after the Asylum_, curated by Sajdeep Soomal and featuring work by Hannah Hull, Agata Mrozowski, Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam, Rupali Mozaria, Ariella tai, and Joe Wood at Trinity Square Video, Toronto.

Header

C Mag

Issue 146

Humour

Letters

Letter to the Reader

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Humour

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Healthy, Complicated Relationships: An Interview with Madelyne Beckles

No Laughing Matter

Laughing at Power, Laughing as Power: On Mike Bourscheid

Tragicomedy, a Toolkit

New Red Order Wants You — In Conversation with NRO: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys

Artist Projects

Say "Hi" by Lisa Smolkin: Text

Say "Hi"

Columns

Composition: The Sound of a Heart

One Thing: Untitled Fall '95

Reviews

Condolere Sanctuaries: Eve Tagny

My Crops are Dying But My Body Persists: Bridget Moser

Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings: Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney

Architecture after the Asylum: Hannah Hull, Agata Mrozowski, Maria-Saroja Ponnambalam, Rupali Mozaria, arielle tai, and Joe Wood

The Pathos of Mandy: Walter Scott

Sparkle's Map Home: Tau Lewis

I Apologize: Jessica Baldanza

I'm Only Going to Show You Once, Now You Try: Alyssa "Sikapinakii" Duck Chief