Find The Performer
C Magazine, November 1983

by Elke Town

On Thursday, September 15, be­tween noon and 2 p.m., Paulette Phil­lips walked from corner to corner at King and Bay. In her simple, slightly prim business suit and with a smart leather envelope tucked under her arm, she blended in perfectly with the mas­ses of office workers on lunch breaks. Similarly unobtrusive, but this time dressed and hatted as a man, she hung out on the northeast corner of Queen and Sherbourne on the morning of Tuesday, August IB, one solitary "man" among many. On the afternoon of Saturday, July 23, she stood per­fectly still among the Chipwich and cold drink vendors in front of the subway en­trance to the Hudson's Bay complex at Yonge and Bloor. Attired in her sum­mer whites, she stood her ground among streams of afternoon shop­pers. A few months later on a rainy Oc­tober 12 afternoon, she walked the Queen Street West section between Bathurst and John, a stretch she de­scribes as the "self-expression" dis­trict. Dressed pretty much as herself this time she delivered a steady im­promptu monologue addressing no one in particular much in the way of those who vent the obsessions and compul­sions of their lives to public witness.

Each of these events lasted about two hours and each was recorded on slides, audio and videotape. Only in the last piece, the walk along Queen Street West, was the connection between Phillips and the recording devices di­rectly apparent. Pushed along side her in a wheelchair, her assistant recorded her every sentence and move, while another assistant recorded the fact of Phillips being documented. Phillips later recalled that the wheelchair and its in­habitant attracted considerably more attention than her behaviour. But at­tracting attention in these perfor­mances was hardly Phillips' point. In her other locations, her conjunction with the environment was so complete that although her constant presence might in fact have been noticed by people, the link between her and the recording technology, stationed usually on another I didn't see Phillips perform on any of these occasions. I wasn't intended to and neither was anyone else. The one time she was approached by someone she knew - during the Queen Street monologue - she deflected the personal encounter by raising the volume of her monologue to a shout and continued on her way. These anonymous perfor­mances were private, their occurrence unmarked by an announcement of time or place. Passers-by, complicit by their presence in a particular place at a particular time, form the framework against which Phillips' own presence is articulated in the resulting documenta­tion of the events. And it is her concern with her own presence, with putting herself on the line between private and public, that allows her to socialize her work. The photographic and taped re­cords of the performances are not however intended to serve as substi­tutes for direct contact, as final ob­jects to mediate between Phillips and her potential audience. Nor is she in­terested in creating a repertoire of be­havioural images upon which to build a personal mythology. Rather she wants to test her nerves, her vulnerability and endurance in the open, outside an art context.

On the evening prior to each of the street performances, Phillips released the more public part of the work - one of a series of four posters, all entitled with the statement and command. "FIND THE PERFORMER". Fifty copies of the 99 x 64 cm. diazoprints [bluep­rints] were spread in an area ranging from Downsview to Cherry Beach, from Jane and Finch to Scarborough. Using herself as model, Phillips con­structed four different portraits, each in some way referring to the sub­sequent performance. Her incarnation as the self-absorbed, but unseeing, Florentine bronze preceded her action at Yonge and Bloor, the crossroads of Toronto's more affluent shopping district; her reclining, burned-out junkie preceded Queen and Sherbourne, the area of men's hostels and temporary employment offices; her dirt-covered coal-worker preceded King and Bay, the area of the coal-workers' contemporary white-collar counterparts; and finally, her female crucifixion preceded the Queen Street West monologue. Like most posters these had a short street life.

As in the street performances, Phillips' presence in the posters is essential. Isolated against a stark and empty background and clothed only in identify­ing props and body make-up, she offers herself as the bronze, the worker, the junkie and the martyr. Unlike Cindy Sherman who transforms her appear­ance to create melodramatic images of stereotyped female subjectivity which are so completely convincing in their familiarity that Sherman is private and hidden behind them, Phillips surrenders her body to public scrutiny. In a written statement about "FIND THE PER­FORMER" Phillips states that she is concerned with "the tacit passivity of the subject which through the recorded self-consciousness of the subject, re­lates actively and aggressively to the viewer. In turn through the self-con­sciousness of the viewer the act of per­forming is transposed from the subject to the viewer". Wanting also to focus on the "objectification of subjective ex­perience", Phillips intends "FIND THE PERFORMER" to culminate in a final performance for an intended rather than circumstantial audience. This final portion of the work is to be based on the accumulation of her responses to the documentation of both the street work and the posters in their final stages of disintegration on the street. Her pres­ence will again be critical as she intends to distinguish herself clearly from the documentation and the posters. By re­inserting herself in the work before an audience, she maintains control over the work and allows for a reciprocity that the documentation and posters alone do not. Her command to "FIND THE PERFORMER" will remain an ac­tive proposition.

But it is the degree of revelation she achieves in the posters that interests me, even though I find their connection to the places of performance some­what literal. In them, her own female presence and body have equal value to the icons of passivity and submission she chooses to depict. Without the slightest trace of eroticism, she pre­sents herself as women are seldom seen. Even in the bronze, she is so obvi­ously a woman's body in a man's pose and role. In adopting this stance, she acknowledges that while the submis­sion of women is a given, that of men is based on an obedience to greater pow­ers operative within their sphere but outside their realm of control. In her transgression, she points to the limita­tions of how women are most fre­quently portrayed and with poignant clarity makes the connection between art and life, between how we are and how we choose to represent ourselves. The beautiful Florentine bronze is in the one hand a precious object but also an emblem for passive submission to sex­ual conquest and physical ideals. The Walker Evans style coal-miner is about human submission to industrial neces­sity but also represents a style of photo-documentary realism which is in­tended to raise the consciousness of the viewer to the conditions of work­ers. The junkie exposes the deprivation and disenfranchisement of those who will not or cannot participate in any as­pect of the labour force and also reve­als the degree of voyeurism that a belief in the authority of the camera engen­ders. The martyr submits to his father's divine will and is the ultimate symbol for surrender in Christianity, the religious foundation of Western so­ciety.