Suzie Lake [Performances] Published to accompany the exhibition Suzy Lake: My Friend Told Me That I Had Carried Too Many Stones by Ingrid Jenkner, Director © MSVU Art Gallery, 18 January to 16 March, 1997. Given the special circumstances of this exhibition, it seems fitting to preface commentary on Suzy Lake's new work with an attempt to place her as an artist. Suzy Lake's solo debut in Halifax takes place at the Mount concurrently with the exhibition Action/Performance & the photograph, a Los Angeles-organized survey of photographs documenting artists' performances and actions orchestrated for the camera between 1960 and 1990. Within this international compilation, which is otherwise highly informative, the low representation of female artists raises the issue of sexist bias, of omissions rendered all the more prominent by the major entry during this period of women into non-traditional art practices. Since critical invisibility of this sort is one of the stones Suzy Lake has had to carry, the presentation of her work opposite Action/Performance & the photograph serves, however symbolically, to mark a recurrent gap in the writing of history. Suzy Lake began to perform for the camera in the early 1970s. Her affiliations with artist-run organizations and enterprises such as Avalanche secured her membership in a diffuse, artist-driven, university-educated avant-garde that, out of necessity and political inclination, produced its own organizers, theorists and critics. This was the era of Body Art and the leveling aesthetics of Fluxus, Conceptual Art, the New Left and the Second Wave of the Women's Movement. For Lake and her politicized peers, the effort to break down art's separation from everyday life required the use of representation against itself, the abandonment of style as a form of individual copyright, and its replacement by rhetorical strategies grounded in combinations of performance, photography, video and verbal language. Moving beyond the situational "theatre" of Minimalism, which pervaded the Montreal milieu at the time, Suzy Lake began in 1973 to bring staging and spectatorship into a problematic relationship with photography, through her practice of performance as self-portraiture. 1A former model and mime, Lake typically adopted a sexually cool persona, demurely clothed and sometimes in whiteface, as though in anticipation of the accusations of narcissism launched against contemporary female body artists.2Posing and "behaving" for the camera rather than for a live audience gave her more control. It also permitted the alteration of negatives and prints, deliberate violations that dramatized her vulnerability as a photographic subject. In series such as Suzy Lake As... 1974 and Are You Talking To Me? 1979, her handling of the photographic self portrait both foregrounds the fact of representation, and installs social presence in the art object. Similar presentation formats, likewise joined with themes of self-transformation, arise in the video production of her contemporaries in Canada - Lisa Steele (Juggling) and Martha Wilson (Perfection/Deformity) - as well as the video and photography of the Americans Joan Jonas (Mirror Check) and Eleanor Antin (Carving). Still, from her vantage point, Suzy Lake's practice remained critically and geographically isolated. Having exhibited in Basel (1974) with Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim, among other international figures, Lake recalled in 1993 that, "I was looking at male and female [body-based art] without really focusing on the issue of gender. I had come to identity issues through political activism. Then, of course, my work made me realize how gender was politicized as well." 3 As the daughter of working-class parents, Lake insists that her consciousness was shaped in the late 1960s by the Left and that her primary political identity was that of class. And while it is true that radical feminists of the period tended to rely on a class formulation of gender politics, their priorities in those days maintained an urgent focus on practical strategies such as consciousness-raising, action and protest, largely to the exclusion of theoretical inquiry into the politics of image-making.4Perhaps the frontality and critical reflexiveness of Lake's early projects reflect the intersection of the two revolutionary movements. Both feminism's and Marxism's attention to power relations is acknowledged in Lake's artistic exposure of her own struyggles to exist as a fully realized subject. By refusing to celebrate a negatively defined "otherness," by implying the complicity of mediation and looking in the constitution of subjectivity, Lake was, at least until 1980, effectively making "objects in advance of the concepts" of North American academic feminism. In comparison with Lake's other work, the components of My Friend Told Me That I Had Carried Too Many Stones appear small and elegant, even understated. They have a curious, box-like dimensionality. As images and as constructions they retain the shallow, confining space of her earlier self portraits. Viewers familiar with Lake's history as a self-photographed subject will recognize the partly-obscured figure portrayed in the images as hers. The new work is composed of four series built around three scenes. The three panels in My Friend Told Me That I Had Carried Too Many Stones present colour photographs of a woman scratching a peeling wall, head-and-shoulders view. In Chrysalis, a sequence of three colour photographs shows the figure sweeping debris in front of the same wall. As in My Friend Told Me..., the gesture changes from frame to frame, giving the effect of a continuous action stopped by the occasional release of the camera's shutter. This image repeats in Making A True Space, where the use of a black and white toned print gives the subject matter a retrospective aura. The final image, showing portions of a woman's nude torso and abdomen, is barely discernable. It occurs on two flesh-toned fragments of black and white photo-emulsion that have been peeled from their paper and delicately mounted with pins in hinged boxes, facsimiles of the butterfly collector's, to form the Specimen Boxes. Lake makes an issue of framing and construction in this work. Instead of window mats, the photographs of the figures in My Friend Told Me... and Chrysalis are surrounded by colour enlargements of the distressed wall surface, mounted about one-half inch in front of the inner photograph, and recessed in a box-style frame about three-quarters of an inch deep. Through the embedding of its tiny image in a block of plaster with a rough, window-like opening, Making A True Space reiterates the literal, material presence of the wall. In Specimen Box, the mounting device replaces the depicted space of the room with that of a receptacle designed for storage and presentation. One consequence of these spatial constructions is to accentuate the materiality of the photographic print at the expense of its illusionist transparency. Lake's manipulation of her materials serves as well to support the central metaphor of the piece which, progressing through photographed gestures of peeling and sweeping, culminates in the presentation of the peeled, exposed emulsion as cast-off skin. Suzy Lake says of her newest body of staged self-portraits, "These are probably the quietest works that I have ever done." The lyrical colour, small size and talisman-like solidity of her photo-constructions suggest an emotional settling in the life of this autobiographical artist. In contrast, the implicitly violent themes in previous works support the new series' connotation of the subject having struggled, as conveyed in the title. There is narrative and structural continuity with Pre-Resolution: Using the Ordinances at Hand 1984. In Pre-Resolution the artist's fragile figure swings a sledge hammer against a lath and plaster wall, within a box frame that is painted trompe-l'oeil fashion to appear continuous with the photographic image. To this pictorial enactment of demolition, My Friend Told Me... opposes the iconography of renovation. In the new series, whether turning away from the camera or deliberately cropping out her head, Lake forsakes a self-consciously exposed stance. As a signifier, the appearance of a woman apparently unaware of the camera's presence replaces Lake's facial expressiveness, her full authorial presence. Subtly, using serial formats and nuances in focus, Lake directs attention to the figure's gestures and, through shifts in scale, to the enframing elements. Her rigorous exclusion of climactic incident gives equivalent critical weight to all of the information presented--what does it reveal and conceal?--and thus to the protocols of reception-- how to sort the collision of photographic illusionism, gender and gesture with the counter-narrative implications of frame and surface? Intent on her tasks, Lake's half-dressed figure appears in a private space, as though glimpsed through a window. This is a strategic decision on the part of the artist since she is, nevertheless, posing; the first-person voice of the work's title affirms the authorial identity of the photographed subject. In comparison to the works of the 1970s and 1980s, Lake's set-up has changed, so that the psychological meaning of the image hinges on the subject's self-absorbtion, herr apparent refusal to engage with a viewer positioned as observer or interlocutor. The figure's operations on the photographed surfaces may be construed either metaphorically, as self-renovation-evidence of a hard-won agency-or literally, as evidence of domestic oppression. The suggestion of renewal offered by the "shed skin" in the Specimen Boxes reinforces the former interpretation.5Extending the metaphor from this point, then, and considering the wall-like framing of the images, the aperture through which the figure is viewed serves less to construct the viewer's gaze as voyeurristic, than to signify "break-through," comparable to emergence from the chrysalis, as an act of the object of the gaze. This complex structuring of subjective agency is reinforced by Lake's spatial treatment of duration. The stopped-time effect of photographed actions presented simultaneously, in series, counters the connotation of "someone who has been photographed" (an effect of absence) and shifts it to the situational present of "someone who is being looked at," or at least, of an action currently in progress. Lake's depicted actions as a photographic subject are so unassuming, in the end, that despite their poetic resonance, they recede into the context of a larger project. Lake has devoted a career to exploring the knowledge that to pose for the camera is already to transform oneself, an inference consistently dramatized in her work.6In My Friend Told Me That I Had Carrried Too Many Stones she reflects with renewed consciousness on the primacy of the photographic act in her life, and its ability to mobilize the needs and desires of both viewer and viewed. NOTES 1In her paper "The Cyclopean Evil Eye: Minimalist Sculpture, Performance and Photography," read at the 1996 University Art Association Conference, Montreal, Barbara Fischer has traced the revision of subject-object relations in the minimalist object through the gender-specific positioning of consciousness more usually attributed to dance, happenings, performance and photo-based artmaking of the 1970s. Her analogy between the subjective staging of the spectator's body in the encounter with (post) Minimalist sculpture and the experience of being photographed is provocative. 2Refer to Lucy Lippard, From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women's Art Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1976; 125-127. 3Suzy Lake in Robert Enright, "Researching the Self: Interview," Border Crossings (Winter 1994):14. 4Refer to Redstockings (Kathie Sarachild, ed.) Feminist Revolution Toronto; Random House, 1978. 5In the context of Lake's overall project; her constitution of herself as the viewer's signified, and her dual existence as a person and as a set of publicly circulated images, this last detail bears similarities to the Shroud of Turin. As a trace image the peeled emulsion has evidentiary status and as a specimen it possesses, by imputation, magical powers. 6Henry Sayre provides an extended analysis of this phenomenon, beginning with Roland Barthe's Camera Lucida, in Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance; the American Avant-Garde since 1970 Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989. SELECTED REFERENCES Burnett, David and Schiff, Marilyn. Contemporary Canadian Art. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1983 Enright, Robert. "Researching the Self; Robert Enright Interviews Suzy Lake," Border Crossings (Winter 1994):II-22. Ferguson, Bruce. Suzy Lake: Are You Talking to Me? Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1980. Fisher-Taylor, Gail. "At the Epicentre," Thirteen Essays on Photography. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1990. ImPositions. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978 Hanna,Martha. Suzy Lake: Point of Reference. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1993. Lake, Suzy. "A Genuine Simulation of..."With introduction by Chantal Pontbriand. Montreal: VÈhicule Co-op Press, 1975. Lippard, Lucy. From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women's Art. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1976. Richard, Alain-Martin, & Robertson, Clive. Performance in Canada 1970-1990. QuÈbec: Šditions Intervention, 1991. Suzy Lake: Authority is an Attribute, Part II. With essays by Gerta Moray, Mary Laronde/David Kilgour. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1992. Wan/Lake. With essays by Chantal Pontbriand and Diana Nemiroff. Edmonton: SUB Art Gallery, University of Alberta, 1982.