Some Help From Inert Friends

This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.

Being an image-conscious child created some very particular struggles for my family. In the nineties we were just making it in our middle class economic reality, but we managed quite well on a single income thanks to my mother’s fastidious money management. Frozen and canned vegetables, and the fact that I was completely ambivalent about missing my expensive elementary school ski lessons, helped our financial security along as well.

A struggle my parents had because of our tight income, was dealing with their very visual and stubborn child’s extremely particular ideas about self-presentation. Somehow I was able to wrangle more than a couple of brand new Northern Getaway cartoon animal sweatshirts, in purple or teal, to put in the mix with hand-me-downs from my cousin which I inherited from my older sister. I must have given my parent’s financial ledger quite the headache.

Power in Passivity

Ideas of privilege, oppression, and agency have been churning through the mixer in my brain since I visited Jody Macdonald’s exhibition, Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?, on the last day of April. The artist’s series of little fabric sculptural figures, rendered in immaculate and staggering detail, provided a great jumping off point for me to delve into ideas of how visuality informs identity. Specifically speaking, it provides some pretty rich material about how much of a hand we can have in this process.

Paper dolls, action figures, voodoo dolls, plastic blow-up figures that loosely resemble ladies. If there is one thing that connects these inanimate incarnations of the human form, it’s that they are slaves to our creative play. Just imagine what must be going on inside their little heads as limbs are inadvertently torn in the removal of tabbed backless faux gowns, as armor is flushed down toilets, as pins are inserted, or orifices are violated without consent. I hear a tiny soprano chorus of “Nooo!”s when I conjure up this image. No wonder children have such intense fascination with the destruction of their inert friends. Without so much as a struggle, kids torture the little toys to death until parents must act as toy undertakers and sentence playthings to a garbage dump grave.

My imagination has clearly animated the inanimate. My primary intention is not to illustrate how much fun it is to live inside my imagination, but to point out what connotations emerged in my experience of Macdonald’s work. Further, I’m trying to convey what role we as viewers must play to try and animate her figures in order for the work’s meaning to be activated. We play with dolls. And with these art ones, we have to play with their meanings. What stories are being told, and what power dynamic is being set up between viewer and object?

The Real Slim Shady Can’t Stand Up.

In the title piece, “Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up”, the big story is in the minute details. Two seemingly identical figures sit in seemingly identical chairs. One character is in leather and printed fabric, seated in a tiny oak chair. The other convincingly mimics with vinyl and hand-drawn fabric while seated in a twin plywood chair.

There are many reasons The Real can’t stand up. These not-living creatures are secured in their seats like they are about to go to the electric chair. But taking these ideas of artifice and manipulation in identity a step further, these figures are just as constructed as the celebrity alter ego upon which they are based. Do the more expensive materials really make a difference in distinguishing these two impostors? What purpose does the word “real” serve in the discussion of identity and recognition, when image and identity is fully constructed anyway? The fact that these figures face certain death by fake electric chair makes me wonder if there is some embedded meaning here about how we, too, are condemned to search for authenticity and individuality paradoxically through imitating those that are celebrated and/or idealized.

Macdonald makes poignant use of the recurring bull’s eye symbol. Not only are we targeted in the world to reflect, recreate, and maintain ideals, often those of more benefit to the fashion industrial complex than to the average person, we also target each other. I’m sure every person you meet in a day or whose eyes scan these words has some unfortunate story about an “imperfection” of her/his own being conspicuously pointed out by another. We are all in some way or another fashion police, giving reprimands and tickets to those who don’t quite cut it.

Macdonald takes this idea in an engaging direction, exploring the way in which we target and are targeted on grounds of conformity and individuality. Tourist Attraction appropriates the content of Frieda Kahlo’s self portrait, Little Deer (1946). Although there is something disconcerting about treating an image of the artist-as-wounded-deer as something worth imitating, arrows and all, I think there is room to interpret this work through a rosier lens. I find humour and comfort in the family eagerly gathering around the image inspired by an artist with a unibrow and chronic back problems. A Mexican woman married to a fervent communist. It’s hard to see this as a dull way to conform, even if there are some pointed, painful consequences. It makes me wonder if micro levels of popularity and conformity, like in a family unit, can provide a unified front of rebellion against oppressive macro-level norms.

The Problem that Remains – Making Privilege Less Transparent

When I was able to show up at my elementary school in a brand-new sparkly polar bear sweatshirt, my class privilege was completely clear to me. So clear, in fact, that I couldn’t see it. This is exactly what is so tricky about the identity markers we wear, such as race, class, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.

Whether or not this is what Macdonald is getting at in “People In My Neighbourhood” is still an open question, in my mind. Twelve little figures of all shapes and sizes stand on a plinth in uniform coveralls. On each garment is the ubiquitous “Hello, My Name Is” sticker, and on each is written one of the following labels:

Yes, people labeled in these ways can be treated like they are as uniformly worthless as the tiny coveralls these dolls wear. However, I think it is important to reach beyond the ideas that I read in this image to talk about the oppressive power of words and labels with greater complexity.

While artists are often forced into the margins because of a lack of financial investment in their work, it is important to note the different level of repression and staying power this label, artist, has. It is a label that can be owned and discarded with much greater freedom than some of those featured on the nametags. People who find themselves labeled thusly can’t take it off and on as easily as a garment, and those who can are remarkably privileged. Often the resources they do have are as effective as using hand soap to remove a tattoo.

The thing about identity, labels, and privilege is that their negative powers often go unchecked. Their stranglehold is underestimated. And while the exhibition on the whole serves as a broad exploration of issues of power and identity, I encourage you as you view the exhibition to stretch the issues further, and make words, labels, and their power the good kind of opaque. Transparency leads to invisibility in this case, making potent and repressive labels impossible to see.

There is room in this show to be provoked, and that is a rich idea playground.

I’m interested to hear about your experiences with the exhibition – please write comments, questions, and concerns to make yourself visible too! And keep your eyes peeled for my forthcoming article on the exhibition in Latitude’s Projex Room: Patrick Higgins’ Prevalent Assembly.