“Un-home-ly”

Way back in the mid-’90s when I headed off to Trent University for grad school, I caught the cresting wave of identity politics full in the face after five years of obliviousness as a U of T undergrad who spent more time at rock concerts than protest rallies. The ideology of correctness that had been diluted in the sprawl of Toronto was concentrated in the smaller population of Peterborough, and the ubiquity of the sentiment was made clear to me through musical means. As if it had been distributed to each new student on registration, Ani DiFranco’s CD (or cassette!) Not a Pretty Girl could be found in every residence, in every apartment, beside every beat-up boom box. It was in those residences and apartments that I had my first real (and, yes, horribly belated) political awakening and learned, from my first real feminists, the true nature of my obliviousness.

My subsequent struggles with “positioning” myself as a white, male, etc, came back to me as I approached the debut exhibition from newly minted Oakville Galleries’ curator Matthew Hyland. The show’s title, “Un-home-ly,” led me to recall DiFranco’s lyric and consider the “homely” girl, who wasn’t conventionally pretty, asserting her refusal of popular aesthetics. Minus the prefix, the idea of making ugly as a critical stance runs through a lot of the work in this the first of Hyland’s three planned exhibitions focusing on contemporary feminist practice (the next, on the theme of utopia, is slated for 2012). The most prominent re-appraisal is made with Luanne Martineau’s soft sculpture Dangler as it one-ups ugly to the level of abjection in a symbolic and literal disemboweling of the art historical female body. There are precedents for this in the work of sister artists like Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois, but the original violence can be traced to the unsubtle misogyny of the mostly male Surrealists (Hans Bellmer, in particular). Back then their fascination with making the familiar strange was tied explicitly to Freud’s notion of the Uncanny. Through a direct translation of the German “unheimlich,” Hyland draws attention to the specifically domestic roots of the word and uses it to introduce the shared theme of his collected artists’ practice.

Martha Rosler’s seminal (is there a feminine equivalent to this adjective?) video Semiotics of the Kitchen makes the clearest case for a conflicted homeliness (in the English sense and synonymous with “homey”) as the artist demonstrates a selection of kitchen appliances with the deadpan exactitude of a Stepford wife. The unmistakable violence of her gestures is echoed in a number of horror movie riffs alluding to the fascination/repulsion axis that continues to characterize our complex relationship to representations of women in both art and popular culture. Suzy Lake takes on Travis Bickle’s simmering rage in her photo series “Are You Talking to Me?” Jin-me Yoon turns herself into a squirming human-slug for Intersection 6. Mako Idemitsu’s dystopian Another Day of a Housewife has the titular character under constant observation by a disembodied tv eye. Paulette Phillips goes old school with the Frankensteinian electromagnetic charge of her Homewrecker installation. Even Lucy Gunning’s now classic Climbing Around My Room has an air of Twilight Zone dread with the artist’s endless scramble along the walls of a small room.

The ongoing discursive value of this artistic strategy lies in its avoidance of simplistic dichotomies. Here Rosler and Lake don’t make the grade. They remain historically significant but critically anachronistic from a contemporary perspective. The models of femininity they reject are irrelevant in the age of Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga. Phillips and Gunning, however, display an irresolution that makes them something more than (and I hope I don’t get eviscerated for saying this) mere political statements and, in doing so, allow me, the put-upon male (wannabe) feminist, entry (for lack of a better term) into the work. Martineau’s amalgam of ownerless parts is even more open to a variety of readings—a multiplicity, it should be emphasized, that in its inclusiveness doesn’t neglect the gender discourse—whereas Liz Magor’s trompe l’oeil sculpture of fake towels camouflaging real cigarettes seems doomed to always be read as the story of a housewife hiding her smokes.

Fifteen years after my consciousness-raising sessions in higher academia, the care with which I conscientiously tread this precarious ground can be attributed to those school-day concerns that my privileged voice would drown out—or worse, obliterate—the voices of others (or, Others). I do my best not to succumb to the male gaze as I figure out how to respond to these works and, even harder, judge them. Lucky for me, most of the artists exceed the curatorial frame rather than simply adhere to it. Shana Moulton’s video series “Whispering Pines” mashes-up the standard late 20th-century socio-cultural tropes in a free flowing and forward thinking way that is reminiscent of the next wave feminism of those riot grrrls who redeemed the gender wars of the nineties. The godmother of the visual artists of that era is Pipilotti Rist whose I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much reverses the trend with so-called political art, getting even better with age. The video’s connection to the domestic is tenuous at best, but its appropriation of a lyrical fragment from the original boy band through technological means says even more about identity, in all its valences, with a playfulness that is liberating rather than resistant. Call it “semiotics of the video camera” and consider it a stepping stone to Hyland’s second act. ❚

“Un-home-ly” was exhibited at Oakville Galleries from November 27, 2010, to February 20, 2011.

Terence Dick is a writer who lives in Toronto. He is the Toronto correspondent and editor for www.akimbo.ca.