Probe

January 11 to February 16, 2002

There are many different applications for the term probe. For example, the R.C.M.P. may conduct a probe into police activities where there have been accusations of heinous racism. Another kind of probe may involve flinging a satellite into deep space in hopes of peeping into the receding depths of infinity. Some people may even hold the belief that such outer-space probes anticipate the somewhat extraneous anal probes of extraterrestrials, carried out on unsuspecting earthling victims. Oddly enough, the tenor of this later probe points us in the right direction to examine the work of Jewel Goodwyn and Andrew Harwood. The probe that is manifest in PROBE investigates the human body and the sexual points of contact whereby inside meets outside. This is not a particular point, but rather a wide open field for investigation, as vast (and as vague) as the outer limits. Both artists approach their respective "probes" in extremely different ways. Jewel Goodwyn is a cultural agitator who has spent much of her time and energy challenging orthodox constructions of what it is to be a woman and practicing artist in contemporary Canadian society. Andrew Harwood is a gay multi-media artist and provocateur who acts and misbehaves within the concentrated setting of the modern metropolis. The common strategy that ties this work together, an "investigation by penetration", is large enough to accommodate two such disparate personalities. More refined pop-cultural themes cross over between the artists-- but I wonder, how useful is it to underscore circumstantial relations when what we have to revel in with PROBE is a two-person show? For the purposes of this essay the significance of the commonalties between Goodwyn’s and Harwood’s productions shall be suspended in favour of discrete texts, from which I hope the reader will draw his/her own conclusions.

GOODWYN

Jewel Goodwyn’s research for PROBE entailed some degree of role reversal as well as appropriation. In the capacity of researcher we see the artist’s subversive gaze directed by the male gaze locked onto the female form (or at least pieces thereof). The artist explores variously; pornographic accouterment, trade show apparatus, kinky ready-mades and advertising-- themes that she captures with a burlesque sense of humor. Hence the subject of her research, the male jerking off to gyrating images of female body parts, is a consumer first and foremost. While said representations may cause a stir within the gallery frame, pornography accounts for the majority of the virtual enterprise and a fair chunk of the video marketplace. Furthermore, what differentiates these pornographic representations from erotic pictures and paraphernalia must be related in terms of the former’s peculiar consumptive application. Whereas erotica always evokes some degree of mystery, especially in terms of how we relate to the subject of our desire-- the "other", pornography flattens out the subject into a completely subservient form for the purposes of masturbation (and sexual arousal). In flattening the subject into an object, pornography effectively robs erotica of its mysterious register. Goodwyn has observed this male consumptive act in order to incorporate some of the very same crass, vulgar, and explicit paraphernalia into a decidedly ambiguous field of crossed representations. The mass-produced sex toy collides with intimate spoken word texts. Furthermore, the feminist critique that she brings to bear complicates the pornographic forms by imbuing them with subjective tones. In so doing Goodwyn’s process underscores the fragility of pornographic representations, how easily such pictures or objects can be complicated and thereby turned into subjective forms that resist domination.

With regards to her work Goodwyn once remarked, "if the essence and offense is in the cunt let the cunt speak." Hence the challenge that Goodwyn makes, with regards to questions that feminist theorists such as Kate Millet have identified as "the woman’s shame," is anchored by a very dark and critical sense of humour. "When Two Lips Speak" features seven adult store "pocket pussies," prosthetic female genitalia that serve as dismembered masturbatory implements generally for men. Behind each of these disturbingly detailed latex objects is a hidden speaker that emits a low volume stream of spoken word. The artist generated the sound recording from a series of interviews with various women. The sound component whispers, drawing the spectator into an uncomfortably intimate proximity to the "sex toys", a low and husky effect that conjures a compelling situation where aural meets oral sex. "Pssst! Over here!" sets the dialogue in motion, jumping from channel to channel and vagina to vagina. However, unlike the 1-900 or internet sex services, these women recite feminist writings and personal sexual fantasies juxtaposed to recitations of the "realistic pussy" ad copy—in total a series of sound bytes that either contrast or ridicule the mass produced and repeated objects. This disturbance of the assumptions one carries with regards to such objects, in tandem with their hanging at "art level" rather than groin level, speaks to the artist’s abiding interest in dismantling oppressive sexual representations by re-incorporating said forms into a positive model. In particular, the position of the vagina is made active rather than passive, re-positioned "on top" as it were, a strategy that recurs throughout her work on view in PROBE.

Sex sells almost everything under the sun. Goodwyn has chosen to ensnare the very people who screw through corporate advertising and thereby invert the "sex sells" equation. "Fucking Happy," a massive trade show display, enmeshes familiar signs of advertising (marked by the large scale and re-touched photography) with the savage cropping of pornographic representations. Herein advertising is implicated as a medium that quite naturally veers towards a pornographic means of representation. As with the most commonly used devices for consumer marketing, this "happy" sales booth flattens its subject for the consumer, airbrushes out lint and unseemly texture, and thereby distills the image into an "anybody" cunt, now ripe for the picking. The equally ubiquitous happy-face ring spells out the mood of the piece like so much dictation. The overall effect, as with so many of the delineated representations that Goodwyn PROBEs, propels the familiar and cliché into a critique that boarders on ridicule, and in which the fragility of such mediated constructions is exposed.

HARWOOD

Freder: It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme?
Frederson: In their proper place, the depths.

In 1933 Hitler’s top spin-doctor, propaganda Minister Goebbels, invited Fritz Lang to head the Nazi German film industry on the strength of what was reputedly the Nazi leader’s favorite film-- "Metropolis" (1927). This piece of speculative fiction reveled in a fantastic projection of how urban architecture and city planning may be directed by the fin de siècle. The cautionary message in Lang’s film, exemplified by the dialogue at the head of this paragraph, was lost on Hitler, as was the film-maker himself (Lang fled the country shortly after the invitation arrived). The invisible hands that built Lang’s "Metropolis", relegated to "the depths", nonetheless instilled brick and mortar with a fantastic projection of form and beauty—a variety of repressed sexuality cloaked by function. Lang naturally attributed his future city with elements beyond belief, the very same kind of suspension that is operating in all speculative and utopian architecture.

Enter the designs on parade at the Expo ‘67 in Montreal. As Harwood has pointed out, Expo ‘67 was a special time for Canada, perhaps the very first time that our country seemed "interesting" to the outside world. The assembled pavilions amounted to an extension of architectural limits, proposals for the consideration of a world-wide audience for what may come: Metropolis utopias unfolded. Sadly, pathetically, these dreams and boasting schemes were not sustainable in any kind of permanent sense. Perhaps of even greater fascination for Harwood, over and above the abject nature of Expo’s eventual dismantling, is the repressed or otherwise latent content that emerges from their abandoned corridors. In actuality the sullied fate of said Expo is an exceedingly common pathway for such pompous nationalistic trade shows to follow once they have diminished into nostalgia—transforming into a kind of retrograde kitsch that is finally transparent in its flamboyant conceits. From this cause the artist sets out on his project of probing "architecture as drag."

Two "bodies" of work invoke Expo ‘67 in PROBE: the "expo dildo" and "expo bra" series. Of the two, the latter series takes a much more literal cue from its historical source material. In particular Harwood was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s 3/4 geodesic dome, a kind of shining, buoyant DD-cup for the ages. With scissors in hand Harwood re-assembles photographs of Fuller’s U.S.A. pavilion, rendering top-wear that both lifts and separates. Canada, Germany, and the U.S.S.R. undertake similar alterations, becoming fashioned into highly funky brassieres worthy of Rupaul. In each case Harwood observes distinct and prominent characteristics of the respective pavilions, exemplified by his use of the ski-sloped roof of the U.S.S.R. entry. Germany’s elasticized structure made for two bras in the series, adapted from both interior and exterior shots. In contrast to these tailor-made manipulations, the "expo dildo" series represents the various patriotic entries as an identical batch of rubber cocks distinguished only by name-tag and colour. Harwood arranges the cast and branded Expo ‘67 dildos onto three small light tables. This department store method of display accentuates the translucence of the rubber material, likening the penile objects to yummy candy or popsicles suitable for oral fixation. Harwood thereby takes the piss out of the ultimate pissing match, that unspoken contest which constitutes the World’s Fair, proving once and for all that the only constant among such varied cultures is that size does matter. After all, for all of the chest-pounding bravado that energizes this sort of one-upmanship, the pattern of behavior is alarmingly omnipresent.

Harwood’s bras and dildos amount to a musing on the flamboyant and repressed transvestite qualities inherent to overblown architectural detritus. Goodwyn’s pornographic artifacts underscore the vicious appetites that subjugate woman on an ongoing and industrial basis. PROBE therefore uses humour to expose the various skeletons of our contemporary patriarchy-- and make no mistake, both sexes are complicit. Among its many virtues PROBE draws skeletons into the light of day, prompting resistance to an international (read: multinational conglomerate corporate) brand of tyranny. Perhaps it is this variety of probe that forages deepest into uncharted territory: the dark, dank guilt complex of society’s collective unconscious.

DAVID LARIVIERE

The enjoyment is real but it is also motivated by the preoccupation to expose secret agendas, flushing out subconscious desire as it relates to the need to possess. James Elkins, who has written extensively on the "nature of seeing", addresses the strange order of desire that is at bay for Art Historians who "write books that leave themselves out". His example makes for a decent analogy to Lahde’s own fascination with collections, in particular the invisible, supposedly disinterested, forces that play upon the collector. Elkins writes, "In my profession of art history, that is what we routinely do. We construct theories about how all seeing is fraught with gender constructions and power relations, but then we study works of art as if we were just trying to appreciate them—as if we had no desire to possess them by writing about them and reproducing them in our books". (James Elkins, THE OBJECT STARES BACK, Page 31.) With this statement Elkins reflects back onto his own profession, admitting that subconscious desire is a prescriptive impetus that dominates the determinations of art history or indeed, theory itself. Lahde has not only turned the lens back onto her own desires in terms of reflecting on the underlying levels of enjoyment in her work, she has made these methods of control, the very means of containment, the subject of her work. In effect, she has become the conservator that remarks on the underlying, often prescriptive, desires that actually mark her presence as an individual, and all this within the ironic frame of a disinterested authority.