From Conceptualism to Feminism

 

“When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.”

Lucy R. Lippard may claim that being a library page at the MoMA is the only real job she’s ever had, but as a freelance writer, art critic, and curator, she has worked undeniably hard. It’s evident from her list of accomplishments, and in her comment that editing other people’s texts resembles being on vacation compared to writing herself. For anyone who thinks curators sit back and let other people do the heavy lifting, get this: for her so-called Numbers exhibitions—the subject of a new book—she did favours like source out and shoot 400 photographs of purposefully mundane Seattle horizons for artist Robert Smithson who couldn’t be there to do it himself. Curiously, each Numbers show was named for the host city’s population and Canada was lucky to have one. First came 557,087 (Seattle), then 955,000 (Vancouver), then an overlooked 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires), followed by a touring c. 7,500 (Valencia, California). The fact that the third show was so overlooked (Pip Day highlights the absence of press coverage and the shortage of archival material) demonstrates the importance of publishing books on the history of exhibitions.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 (Afterall Books, 2012) is the third title in the Exhibition Histories series published in association with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Van Abbemuseum. It looks not so much at her shift in focus from conceptualism to feminism as the blending of the two: her final Numbers show was still heavy on idea-based art but it included only women artists, some of whom made work with a feminist bent and others who didn’t.

Lippard’s activist impulse was rooted in time she spent in Argentina in 1968 before the Buenos Aires show to jury an art award. It’s hard to imagine being exposed to the type of art being produced there without being affected. For example, Tito Fernández confiscated gallery visitors’ belongings and banned conversation inside the venue to comment on the police state. Characterizing the ‘dematerialization’ of art was Graciela Carnevale’s Acción del encierro (Confinement Action), for which she invited people to a gallery and without forewarning them, locked them inside until someone on the street broke a window an hour later and they escaped. The artists worked in solidarity, at one point burning their works collectively to protest police censorship of a single artist’s (Roberto Plate’s) work and reading a manifesto-like statement at a conference after cutting the electricity. When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.

I almost didn’t review this book because Conceptual Art really isn’t my bag (so many ropes, so many mirrors!). Much of Conceptual Art is text-based (Nancy Wilson Kitchel said it best: “My work would be different if you couldn’t read”) and I find myself agreeing to a point with Peter Plagens’ scathing Artforum review of Conceptual Art’s writing quality. Ultimately, though, I was won over by coverage of the many thought-provoking pieces, like John Latham’s Still and Chew (1966/67). A part-time art instructor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Latham was frustrated by the scholarly high-fiving of critic Clement Greenberg, so he checked out the school library copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture and proceeded to make a unique protest. He invited students, critics, and artists to chew a page from the book and spit it out in a flask. It was chemically treated, and when Latham received an urgent overdue book notice, he had the audacity to present the then liquid solution to the librarian, poker-faced. The next day he was fired.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 includes a main essay by Cornelia Butler, interviews with Lippard and several exhibiting artists, and reproductions of selected index cards that were used in place of traditional catalogues for the exhibitions.

Taking AIM! The Business of Being an Artist Today

“This social cherry-picking is a valid strategy…”

Two years after I moved, people still ask whether I miss New York. I always respond by contrasting life in the Bronx with tourism in Manhattan and the hipster art scene in Brooklyn. My sole regret about moving out of my apartment in the Bronx is that I never had a chance to participate in the Artists in the Marketplace program run by the Bronx Museum of the Arts. I was delighted, then, to discover Taking AIM! The Business of Being an Artist Today (Fordham University Press, 2011, Ed. Marysol Nieves), a book marking its 30-year history of promoting professional development through guest speakers, peer-to-peer studio visits, etc. As I started reading, I wondered if I made a mistake by leaving (prompted by the realization that I shared a glass of wine with one of the two artists interviewed in the introduction after blogging about a book she wrote, and also for my blog, I interviewed one of the three artists from the first chapter). As I settle into my new life in a city with an approximate population of 53,000, it was good to read artist Whitfield Lovell say, “The most significant moments in my career happened when I left New York” (p. 28) and to read Steven Rand from apexart express the need to send New York-centric individuals to remote regions of the world for a broader perspective.

Though partly celebratory, Taking AIM! should in no way be perceived as navel-gazing. Its advice to artists has universal application. Like other professional development books for artists, it emphasizes (repeatedly) that being an artist is hard work. As is typical of these guides, it deconstructs the art world—which collector Dennis Scholl rightly calls a subculture—through multiple perspectives. The content is organized by roles, such as art critic, which is useful if an artist wishes to bolster one section within a CV or foster a particular relationship. This social cherry-picking is a valid strategy, as seen in the advice of, for example, collector Ella Fontana Cisneros to develop a relationship with curators before gallerists, or in the chapter on art fairs, which stresses that gallery representation precedes art fair participation.

As a librarian who conducts collection development in the arts, I always ask whether there is a need for the latest artist guide. The answer is in gallery director Paula Ha’s comment: “Much has changed in the art world, but in some ways, much has not changed at all” (p. 60). In other words, advice on, say, applying for grants and residencies already exists in written form, but there’s always something new to add. At this moment in time, newness is summed up by a cartoon in the introduction of a present day Leonardo da Vinci looking at his laptop and being perplexed that Michelangelo wants to be his friend. The final chapter of the book is entirely devoted to social media, something that was only mentioned in passing in artist guides a few years ago. Curiously, in this chapter, professionals’ comments from separate interviews are cobbled together in the imagined transcript of a single discussion, but it works well, as does the book overall.

Another fantastic resource, also at the end of the book, is the timeline of art events and global news (with bold and regular type differentiating the two). Interdisciplinary educators will appreciate that it highlights art’s role as a social barometer. It reveals, for example, that Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack mural in New York coincided with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and that Nelson Mandela was freed from jail the same year that African artists began exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. It would be nice to see more coverage of Canadian content besides the development of NAFTA* and CAFKA**, especially since content relevant to Canada is included (for example, the first state to legalize same-sex marriage is included, but the surge of weddings of gay American couples in Canada is not). This presumably unintentional editing out of Canadian content is the very reason I submitted work to two exhibitions about reproductive rights this year in the US: to emphasize parallel politics. In the same way that I don’t think Canadians as a whole imagine life in the different boroughs of NYC to differ substantially, I don’t think Americans as a whole realize how deeply connected Canadians feel to their politics. Let me assure you, though, the meme ‘binders full of women’ was discussed all the way up in North Bay at the reference desk this week.

*Not that I don't appreciate the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is, after all, the mechanism through which I was employed in the US.
**Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener + Area

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823234141/taking-aim/

Féminismes Électriques

“Sometimes a rose is a rose is a Rrose.”

Although I recently bought my first car, I wasn’t about to drive seven hours by myself from North Bay to Montreal. To get to a book launch and panel discussion at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse last Friday night, I had to choose between taking a bus at 2 am or taking two six-hour train rides that connected at Toronto’s Union station. That’s when it hit me that I had really moved to northern Ontario. I opted for the train since it meant breaking up the trip with a night of sleep. It also meant that I got to bid farewell to the Northlander in its penultimate week of operation.

I’ve been spoiled traveling with my husband, not just because he loves driving, but because he is bilingual. As I looked unsuccessfully for a map in a Gare Centrale store, I fretted about what I would say if the clerk didn’t speak English. Simple answer: improvise. (“Je desire de chercher pour les directions dans la grande papier [I want to look for directions on large paper]”). The French translation for ‘map’ came to mind an inconvenient five hours later, which was doubly frustrating since I’d had a teleconference with map librarians earlier in the week in which French terminology was discussed.

I didn’t fare much better at La Centrale, where I could only catch a string of four French words at a time, and only two of the six panelists spoke in English. So much for having called ahead to ask if all presentations would be in English. Here’s the punchline of my visit: the following evening, I was having dinner at the home of a former La Centrale board member when she pointed out that the book is being launched at Art Metropole. In, ahem, Toronto. Alas, I’m glad I attended the standing-room-only event to show my support. And perhaps this post will bring people to the Art Metropole launch, which happens tonight. Therein lies the power of self-publishing in the Internet age. As Chris Kraus argues in said book, Féminismes Électriques (2012), blogs are the new zines.

At the launch, editor Leila Pourtavaf spoke about the desire to give feminism “renewed life” through the book’s essays, interviews, and artist project (the latter by G. B. Jones). In short, this means enhanced inclusivity, encompassing trans and queer artists as well as artists with diverse ethnic backgrounds. Trish Salah provides a compelling account of the risks inherent in pluralistic feminism, such as treating male artists as special or as non-men of sorts. Interestingly, La Centrale, Canada’s first gallery for women, recently programmed its first show for a man, the late Will Munro. This shift is the outcome of the gallery spending six years reworking its mandate through consultation with members and colleagues. The publication is equally thoughtful.

Why would six years of contemplation be necessary? Consider that, according to Bernadette Houde, ‘lesbian’ remains a radical term. Helena Reckitt suggests that gender is equally (and relatedly) radical, provoking genderqueer art that experiments with gender rather than accepting existing anatomically-derived definitions. If feminism in its initial iteration focused on the needs of traditional women, how can its contemporary counterpart advocate for those labeled as Other?  

Féminismes Électriques is a fitting title, because its content reminds us how electrifying feminism is: it is feisty, inspiring, sometimes serious and other times fun. Often, feminist art evokes the familiar, such as Women with Kitchen Appliances, a collective that blends images with audio work created using kitchen appliances. ‘Familiar’ doesn’t mean banal, though, as proven by a video by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna featuring her adult self breastfeeding from her mother. Sometimes feminist art takes the familiar and reworks it to emphasize clichés, like Lesbians on Ecstasy, which does ‘performative sampling’ of lesbian folk music from the Second Wave, to resist the association between women and nature and the disregard for female musicians’ technical skill. Arguably opposite to playing with the familiar is indulging the imagination as Stéphanie Chabot and Dominique Pétrin do, with role-playing involving vampires and cannibals. In an interview with Manon Tounigny, Pétrin emphasized how universal art is but also how open to interpretation it is: in performances involving monsters, she found that children have a literal interpretation, teens are impressed, intellectuals interpret it as subversive, gays think it’s queer, and older people find it exciting. Sometimes a rose is a rose is a Rrose.*

The book concludes with a chapter by Aneessa Hashmi, who writes, “The circulation of knowledge cancels out hierarchy” (p. 191): a fantastic mantra for feminists and librarians alike.  

On the occasion of my 100th post, I would like to thank everyone who has read, commented on, or encouraged my writing.

*Apologies for the inside art joke, but I couldn’t resist.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: http://www.editions-rm.ca/livres/feminismes-electriques/

Rethinking Professionalism

“Charlotte Schreiber…couldn’t attend [Royal Canadian Academy of Arts] meetings because it would have meant being alone with 39 men.”

Women. Art. Professionalism. Isolated concepts or a natural combination? I’ve been pondering this question for the past three weeks, ever since I started embroidering in the campus parking lot half an hour before starting work to take advantage of the natural light that has waned by the time I extract myself at the end of the day.

The convergence of women, art, and professionalism is also the subject of the book, Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). Full disclosure: I am a former Queen’s employee and my former place of work, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, is mentioned on the opening page of the preface for its contribution to feminist art history.

An outgrowth of the inaugural Canadian Women Artists History Initiative conference, this multi-authored, hefty tome is a very useful addition to academic library collections supporting gender studies or Canadian art history.

While reading Kristina Huneault’s introductory chapter about the ill-fitting concept of professionalism for women artists, my mind kept flitting back to Eunice Lipton’s Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (1992, Charles Scribner’s Sons). Spurred on by Linda Nochlin, who famously asked why there have been no great women artists, Lipton traveled to Paris to restore dignity to Victorine Meurent, Edouard Manet’s model. Although Meurent was an exhibiting artist and a member of an esteemed professional art society who declared herself an artist twice in the French equivalent of the census, her contemporaries and later art historians dismissed her as an amateur and a prostitute. Huneault’s parallel examples from Canada are lower profile but no less gripping. She identifies discrepancies between a census count of female artists compared to the membership in the Ontario Society of artists. And then there’s the case of Charlotte Schreiber, the only female artist accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in its first 50 years, who couldn’t attend meetings because it would have meant being alone with 39 men.

If you read this book, the historical references may make you angry, whether it’s the virile description of the Group of Seven or the flipside, emphasis on the feminine stature and fashion of Canada’s first female architect. (Curiously, the impulse to emphasize the gender of artists continues today, as one of the female artists’ techniques in the book is described as loving). At the very least, you’ll probably find yourself annoyed by comments like Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson calling the arts appreciation show hosted by his former lover Anne Savage “quite a little job” (p. 121).Yet, there’s inspiration to be found in women’s comments; consider Margaret Watkins’ retort about a critic who passionately disliked her photo of dirty dishes: “Evidently the poor duffer knows nothing of Modern art” (p. 170).

Lest you get the impression that art is unique in its gender bias, Jennifer Salahub reminds us that it affects other disciplines too. As a librarian, I found her comment disheartening: “…when I first began to research Canadian needlework in the 1980s, the Library of Congress Catalogue directed me not to needlework, sewing, or even embroidery but to the letter ‘w’—women’s work.” (p. 138). I tend to be angry rather than annoyed when I read such things, but this book helped me slow down and resist a knee-jerk response. Reading the rest of Salahub’s chapter about intriguing artist, Hannah Maynard, I learned that the Victorian artist included textiles in her photos to maintain a lady-like image while pursuing an unconventional career. From a contemporary perspective (read: privileged life—the kind where I am allowed to drive and work and vote), it’s so easy to overlook awesomely experimental work and harp on what’s traditional, like the artist marketing herself as Mrs. Richard Maynard.

The most poignant content for me was Sherry Farrell Racette’s roll call of names of Akwesane artists who practiced basketweaving. Seeing a photo by Mary Kawennatakie Adams, the first artist on the list—of a basket adorned with teeny decorative baskets the size of a thumbnail—had a tip-of-the iceberg effect and served as a strong argument that female Aboriginal artists have been grossly overlooked by the existing model of art history. Add to that other groups like nuns that have historically been heavily engaged in craft and the entire concept of professionalism starts to fall apart.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.mqup.ca/rethinking-professionalism-products-9780773539662.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto/1/

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

“...Ai is so shocking because he ‘points out society’s dark side’. He does this pointing, very often, with his middle finger.”

Last night at Doc North in North Bay, I watched Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), a documentary about the provocateur. Since the Chinese artist was detained last spring and interrogated daily with no communication about his well-being made to his family or the international community for 81 days—presumably for his activism but officially for tax fraud—screening the film had a pronounced resonance with this week’s jailing of three women in Russia. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina, who are suspected members of the anonymous feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, which addresses issues ranging from the environment to politics, were charged with hooliganism. To quote Ai(who is described even by one of his friends as a hooligan) commenting on his own struggle: “If there is no free speech every single life has been in vain.” 
 

The film directed by American Alison Klayman opens with shots of the cats milling about Ai’s Beijing studio. Taking matters into its own paws, one of those cats figured out how to leap into the air and press on the door handle to exit. Ai is like this exceptional cat. That he regards himself as more of a chess player than an artist reveals his exceptionalism.

Ai’s mother says she wishes her son were purely an artist, but notes that if no one speaks out, what will happen? Her comment is undoubtedly informed by memories of her family’s exile to a remote region of China because of her late husband’s modernist poetry. Growing up in the family he did, Ai knew exactly what he was getting into by taking on the mantra, “Art is about sharing information.” One of his most engrossing projects has been the compilation of the names of 5,212 child victims in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, attributed in part to poorly constructed schools. This endeavour later took visual form in a installation of backpacks that spelled out “She lived happily for seven years” (trans.) and audio form in a recording of individual voices reading one name. As one of his volunteers says, his work “…doesn’t just have to do with art. It has to do with life.” 
 
Blogger and media figure Hung Huang says Ai is so shocking because he “points out society’s dark side.” He does this pointing, very often, with his middle finger (see movie poster). The night that police broke down his door at 3 am and punched him in the head, causing a brain injury that required surgery, Ai shot back with a photo on Twitter, which has become his international mouthpiece after authorities shut down his blog. The price he has paid has been high (he was fined the equivalent of $2.4 million US for tax evasion), but the reward is also high: he was named the most powerful artist by Art Review Magazine last year. Watching him walk through his installation at the Tate Modern with his young son on 100 million ceramic seeds hand-painted by assistants who revere him, one senses his vision and his resolve. “Everybody just live your life,” he told reporters upon his release from those mysterious 81 days. And this is his.

 

Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey

“…far from a tell-all memoir.”

The other night, I was in the biography section of The Strand in New York when I overheard a customer ask an employee how she had located a particular book. The employee explained that the bookstore’s system allows for multiple fields to be searched simultaneously and she had used publisher and author. The customer thanked her and said, “You’re so sweet.” If only all reference interviews were this pleasant! Interestingly, the new Denise Green biography I picked up for half price eludes bibliographic organization. In the introduction to Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey (2012, University of Minnesota Press), Ingrid Periz asks, “Where would it fit on a library shelf?” (p. 11).  She elaborates on how it blurs genres: it’s part autobiography (Green has written or co-written only a third of the content) and part multi-authored biography, mixed with advice and art criticism, in a tone that vacillates between scholarly and chatty.

Contributor Peter Timmins writes, “…words remain the subservient partner to images” (p. 169) in Green’s practice but they are what interest me most, as much as her simplified renditions of everyday objects and fluid use of line are engaging. She’s a good writer—a case in point is the description, “the uncontrollable spread of colour which was India itself.” It’s no wonder the New York-based artist became editor of the feminist journal, Heresies and the equally radical Semiotext(e). What fascinates me is that she began writing about art with the explicit goal of becoming respected as an intellectual, to fight the gender bias facing artists. Her secondary purpose was to weigh in on how paintings were critiqued during the postmodern era governed by Clement Greenberg’s writing; she fought for critics to consider the subjective experience rather than interpreting works in a vacuum.

It’s ironic, then, that the book doesn’t delve too deeply into Green’s personal life. The chapters she has written, however, are far from a tell-all memoir. In part, this discretion may be the result of thematically arranged chapters like ‘the Paris years,’ meaning there is some jumping around (though not to the extent of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume One). For example, she mentions that her alcoholic father had a car accident and in another passage, she concedes that one of her painting series stems from latent grief for him, but the reader never learns whether said accident was fatal. Nor does she disclose any details about the courtship leading to her second marriage. The majority of self-revelation is concentrated on her childhood in Australia and the family dynamics that prompted her to leave the country as a teenager. Periz is accurate in observing, “…Green the woman stays somewhat hidden” (p. 15). In a sense, this strategy allows the reader to focus—intermittently at least—on Green’s art independent on her gender, which is refreshing. Not surprisingly, the chapters written by her colleagues—primarily art critics, curators and gallerists sprinkled around the globe—focus on her extensive artistic contributions over the past 40 years.

Better living through chemistry? Lise Melhorn-Boe's artist's books make you think twice

“... there’s  a mindset of, 'I don’t want to know this.'”

 Now that her show, Endangered, is over in North Bay (where, incidentally, I’m moving next month), Kingston artist Lise Melhorn-Boe was free to chat about her work. 

HS-Your show at the W. K. P. Kennedy Gallery focuses on intense subject matter, like the recent increase in deformed penises in babies attributed to chemical exposure and the positive correlation between homelessness and multiple chemical sensitivities. I swear my eyes started stinging right after reading your Toxic Face Book, which describes the toxins found in common cosmetics. What kinds of reactions have you received in relation to this body of work?

LMB- I have had a lot of positive feedback. Even people who thought they knew a great deal about our environment told me they had learned something. However, many people do think it’s depressing. I thought I was presenting the material in a lighthearted enough way that it would take the edge off the negativity. People are very interested but they’re not gaga over it like they have been for some of my other work, especially my work about women’s lives where they could really relate and wanted to share their own stories with me. With this body of work, there’s  a mindset of, “I don’t want to know this.” Some of the information is very scary. It’s maybe easier just not to know, so you don’t have to worry about it and you don’t have to make choices, but art (or some art) is about making people think and that’s what I’ve always tried to do.

HS- In your artist books, it often feels like you could keep turning the pages forever to read more and more dire statistics about the environment. Gypsy Moth was such a lovely read because the woman who almost died after being dosed with pesticide designed to kill gypsy moth caterpillars gets better at the end. How do you strike a balance between presenting dark subject matter and giving people hope that they can change their ways and make a difference?

LMB- As I said, I was coming at it [the subject matter] from a lighthearted angle. (Laughs). It’s an interesting question and hope is important. Because I was so overwhelmed by negative information, I wasn’t feeling hopeful myself so it was hard to put that in the work. To be honest, sometimes I am glad I am getting old. I’d be really depressed and angry if I were in my twenties, knowing what is ahead of us. At this point in my life, I’m more resigned and cynical.

HS-In terms of making a difference, you don’t just walk the walk. Not only do you make art about garbage, but you refuse to use plastic bags to line your own garbage can, you pick up litter if it can be recycled, and I remember at White Water Gallery, you would save up styrofoam that couldn’t be recycled locally so you could recycle it when you went “down south” as the people of North Bay say. Have you always been so environmentally conscious?

LMB- I made my first environmental project for a Man and Society class in high school when I was seventeen, I think. (What a sexist name! They later changed it to Society, Challenge and Change). It was a collaged book on pollution. So yes, I’ve always been concerned about the environment and involved in environmental groups. This is a timely question because it struck me today that I’ve been riding a bicycle for 50 years.

HS- Today’s protests in Ottawa by scientists angry about the federal government’s cuts to funding for environmental protection underscore the precarious state of the environment. If you could have the attention of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, what would you say to him?

LMB- There’s a term, “precautionary principle,” which posits that it’s better to be safe than sorry. At the moment, anyone can come up with a product and market it and later say, “Oops, that was dangerous.” As a nation, we should think strongly about what materials we’re introducing into our lives rather than trying to mop up disasters in retrospect... and I’d tell him to forget about the tar sands and to come up with a different plan.

HS- Text is very prominent in your work. Which tends to come first: text or image?

LMB- In the past I would have said the text, definitely. When I was working with women’s stories, the story birthed the form of the piece. I interviewed women and used questionnaires, but for this body of work, the responses I got from people were very negative and they weren’t good stories. People were overwhelmed by their health issues and I was not inspired visually by their stories. A story has to have a visual component to transform it into a visual piece. I ended up doing more research in the library than usual, so a lot of the text is factual as opposed to narrative. Maybe that’s why Gypsy Moth stands out. It has a beginning, middle and end, and she [the subject] told it well. Pain started with the text, and in Happy Memories, those are all stories from actual people.

Garbage [in which she collected garbage for seven weeks—save for organic waste—and displayed one week’s worth in each of the seven copies in the edition, each stored in a tiny, adorable garbage can] started with the heavy duty plastic mesh bags which came from the only organic produce that was available to me in North Bay. I thought it was so incongruous. Since the store refused to take them back, I decided I had to do something with them. 

With this whole body of work, I was thinking of the environment as a topic, so I was more aware than usual about my materials. I recycled materials and I recycled ideas. Toxic Face Book uses a leftover cast of a face from a feminist piece called Colour Me Dutiful that was too thin to use at the time. What's For Dinner? uses a similar format to two earlier books—I have often made work about food. And I've used clothing a lot too, in the past, so the baby clothes in Endangered Species and the paper doll clothes in Toxic Kids fit right into my oeuvre. Endangered Species uses PVC connectors I found while trying to find a sturdy way to construct a large tunnel book in the shape of an ice hut for Ice Follies, an art installation festival in North Bay where artists use ice huts on the lake for installations. I was initially planning a piece about the projection that Lake Nipissing [in North Bay] wouldn’t have ice in twenty years, which would be about sixteen years from now. Then the idea morphed because PVC is a really toxic material to create and it seemed perfect to talk about the effect of toxins on babies.

HS-You have an inventive approach to materials, like using a transparent overlay of fabric to represent cheese on a pizza in the book, What’s for Dinner? Do you have fun coming up with these visuals?

LMB- Oh, I have a lot of fun! For me, because it was so much fun making this work that it overshadowed the negative content, I was taken aback when people focused on the negative content over the visual presentation.

HS- You’ve made pop-up books for a long time before your work took an environmental turn. Do you find this format has a different resonance with this subject matter?

LMB- I’ve always used it for its playful character so it was deliberate to pair some of these painful topics with this format to affect the tone. Pop-ups are fun; I teach them to kids in classrooms. I was trying to add an element of playfulness [with pop-ups in this body of work].

HS- What’s it like to make explicitly personal work like Body Map, where you show the interplay between health problems and the environment, with text overlaying  a fairly sizeable photograph of your naked body?

LMB- Just recently, a woman I know who has had breast cancer told me I was very brave and I was surprised because I’d never really thought of it that way. I came up with the idea for Body Map when I did a residency at Queen’s University. I thought about approaching a student photographer but I chose to ask my husband to take the photos even though he’s not a photographer. I’ve been to nudist colonies but I wasn’t comfortable stripping in front of just anyone. Maybe there’s something different about being photographed than walking on the beach. I think I might have been hesitant to do something like that before I had cancer but having had a mastectomy, I don’t feel quite as sexual as I once did, so it’s less revealing personally. Besides, once the image is out there, I’m separated from it.

No Safe Levels also shows my naked body but I took artistic license with it. It’s a pop-up and technically, I needed the right breast to pop up because it was on the fold. That’s actually the one that was cut off, but I just switched them. It’s much more abstract [than Body Map] and not everyone realizes it’s my body.

HS- Can you comment on one of the final images in Breast Cancer Journal  in which a figure floats through the sky, separated from but seemingly drawn to, the earth?

LMB- It was the result of a meditation, something that came to me in a vision. I think it’s me but why I’m floating out there I can’t remember. (Turns the page). This one I had a vision of in a winter solstice ceremony. I saw my breasts on fire. (Turns the page). And this is me holding up my child self and coming back up to the light. (Turns the page). I’m holding myself and mothering myself. It [making this journal] was all very positive. I debated about using text in this piece but I decided I liked the mystery. It wasn’t actually intended to be an art piece. A few people I showed the images to found them powerful, so I thought, “Why not?” In a way, this is more revealing [than works like Body Map]: this is my naked psyche or naked soul rather than my naked body. 

HS- Your earlier work was very feminist. Is the relationship between our health and the environment a feminist issue in your opinion?

LMB- It pertains to everyone but because women have more body fat than men and toxins reside in body fat, in that sense, these toxins affect women more, so that makes it a feminist issue. Also, women carry the next generation and they say the best way to detox is to breastfeed, but that means passing the toxins on to your baby. It was something I worried about when I breastfed. (Looks at her son who coincidentally appeared in the stairwell at this moment). For those reasons, it’s a really important issue for women.

HS- Lastly, are there other environmental artists you admire?

LMB- This is going back a long time, but I was always very moved by Ana Mendieta’s work. The way she put her body in the environment—there was such a strong connection between her and the earth. I suppose that’s essentialist, stressing the connection between women and the earth, and it annoys some people, but if I had to choose a camp, that’s the one I’d fall into.

For images, see Transformer Press

This interview took place on July 11, 2012 at Lise’s home.