The New Work Show
C Magazine, November 1984


by Jennifer Oille


Conventional Interests
"The New Work Show" Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Aug. 27-30

The New Work Show, August 27 to 30 at Theatre Passe Muraille, was organized by Amy Wilson, Randy Gledhill and Rodney Werden and featured 21 videotapes by 24 independent producers in four 90-minute programs. That so many artists had recently completed work constituted the only curatorial rational for the exhibition. The tapes were not submitted (in any form) to the Ontario Censor Board for approval. An event was not made of non-compliance—it was simply business as usual.

Working the Double Shift, Lisa Steele, Kirn Tomczak (17 min., 1984) was a documentary composed of media clips and acted material with three thematic sequences: media stereotyping of Men, Women, The Family, The Artist; the opening of a fantasy socialist parliament as reported by a male and a female TV commentator; the making of an egalitarian family unit. The thesis was the dominance of media culture—its non-neutrality, its sexist, heterosexual, racist, classiest views, its view of society as static. The idealized image of the family would have mom, dad and the kids having supper (break­fast, lunch) in the back garden while the ideal image of a woman in a non-traditional role would have her putting an electric outlet in :he wail as her child looks on. The intention was didactic. The question is —who are Steele and Tomczak addressing? The audiences at the Rivoli (as part of A Space's Altered Situa­tions, Changing Strategies’) or at Theatre Passe Muraille? - in both cases are art audiences with pretensions of social and political awareness. But to say they should be addressing the "average" audience is to underestimate the visual literacy of the average as well as to overestimate viewer passivity.

Ritual of a Wedding Dress, Wendy Walker (9 min., 1984). The sound is an incantation "From Miss to Mrs". A young woman rum­mages through a trunk and finds her mother's wedding dress. She tries it on but can't button it over a recalcitrant nipple, the obvious analogy being that her mother's values don't fit either. We see a snapshot of her mother in the wedding dress. In the context of the tape this is a cruel co-option. There is no analysis or appreciation of the facts that someone may choose to marry, that the role of wife is no more an objectification of women than women's objectification of men when they seek husband material—or, as many post 35, childless, career women do, look on every man as a potential sperm bank.

Torn Setween, Wendy Walker; (3.5 min., 1984). We see the face or a young woman who is literally tearing her hair in some agony of indecision. Torn between what? Anacin and Bufferm? Imagine a world where one TV network elects to advertise the single best brand, rather than competing brands, of toothpaste, tampon, cereal (hot and cold), dog food, cat food, car, deodorant (underarm and vaginal), airline, traveller's cheque, margarine, toilet paper, peanut butter... Think of the time saved on decision-making that could be spent in watching television. Imagine a world that guaranteed shortages. Think of the time that could be expended queuing for oranges and tomatoes rather than on picket/protest lines.

Typically, video is regarded as, to quote Renee Baert, "an alternative to or interven­tion in the TV industry's monopoly on the production of meaning and value". This, of course, discounts TV as a self-critical medium, with its own dialectic. Hill Street Blues supersedes Dragnet, reduces it to a ridiculous stereotype, in what David Marc has called "the comedy of obsolescence". In the same schema, All in the Family supercedes father Knows Best; Jim Anderson yields to Archie Bunker as the Depression-born/post WWII adult group that wanted images of peace and prosperity is superceded by the baby-boomers raised on radical ideas. Images do catch up with ideas once the idea has become a style—or stylized. Have you seen the ad that reads HERPES, VIRUS. PROTECTION. Then a hand holding a purse/pocket size aerosol spray appears, then a toilet bowl...

Typically video is regarded as being issue-oriented. Certainly Working the Double Shift and Ritual of a Wedding Dress are. However there were some tapes in The New Work Show that could have been issue-oriented but weren't.

Timmins (Ont.), Geoffrey Shea (7 mm., 1984). Scenes of the town that used to be one of the largest gold producing centres in the world. In winter. At The Train Station, Maple and Second. Pine and Third. Historical anec­dotes. "The manager informed me that I could not have the money as the bank was not desirous of taking on mining accounts." But Timmins was not concerned with condi­tions at the Hollinger or post-boom times. Its real concern was split screen techniques.

Again and Again "To Our Glorious Dead", Derek Graham (14 min., 1984). It was hard to tell if this was for or against war. Basically, Graham seemed simply fascinated by images of war, composing them, composing with them. A bomber (on a pedestal in a memorial park) dissolves into a toy plane; someone dressed as a soldier fingers a toy pistol; a field installation—a regiment of army pants on wire armatures. But if this were an anti-war tape, shots of marchers in a Veteran's Day parade are as much a mockery as Walker's snapshot of the woman in a wedding dress. The art press has, of course, conditioned ways of seeing video. This conventional thinking aside, video is, of course, not necessary issue-oriented or dominant media/ culture critique.

Absence of Mercy, Dimitrije Martinovic, Chris­tian Morrison (27 min., 1984). Based on Simone Weil's theory of earthly suffering in the attainment of a state of grace, The Fourth Evidence intended to establish the distance that develops between a situation and its protagonists and did. The Fourth Evidence related three stories. One is set in a seedy pizza parlour. A husband and wife operation. He stands and she sits behind the counter and stirs the paste with her hands in a bowl on her lap and. when necessary, globs it onto the dough. In the back room, their two little kids are playing house, for them a make-believe world where after supper you do the dishes and watch TV. A teenage daughter visits. She won't stay for supper; she never does. The sounds—like scraping the dough off the counter—are loud, louder than the voices. The camera angle is high, the focal length long—it's like looking at one of those ant colonies through a glass wall. The second story is set by a bedside. Pill bottles are on the night table. A man is lying comatose. His wife is talking to him, the kind of monotonous conversation about relatives and friends that pretends normalcy, that this is not a terminal case—the kind of conversation that is, in fact, obligatory rather than voluntary. The third story is set in a payphone. In close-up, a man is confessing to the murder of his wife and three children, an act revealed as methodical in a series of flashbacks, the results of rational planning.

It Depends. Paulette Phillips (29.5 min., 1984) is about our natural tendency to fill in gaps, to imagine what goes on behind closed doors. It opens on a streetcar. The narrator is saying she generally goes to work at 11—"It depends...2 " She says she knows three women: a close friend. Miss Carol; "a gal about town", Isabelle, who never looks the same twice and a nameless woman who she sees on the street with a baby. Miss Carol is a photographer. She receives several phone calls requesting her to show up at the Chelsea at 3 with two rolls of film, prepared to work and ensure 21 perfect pictures. Because she is a friend, the portrait is more intimate—detail­ing the way she lights a cigarette, inhales. Because the nameless woman is always seen with the baby we assume her to be the mother. One day, as she is looking in a shop window, Isabelle walks away with the baby in a stroller as if it were her own. We then see the nameless woman alone watching TV and doing her 20 Minute Workout. We see Isabelle putting the baby on a train, the nameless woman waves goodbye to the baby. Miss Carol arrives at the Chelsea. Isabelle and the nameless woman embrace on the station platform. The train carriage is filled with babies. Why shouldn't babies go on holiday like grown-ups do...

The Fourth Evidence... and It Depends are episodic: in the former, the three stories are separate but conceptually related; in the lat­ter, the stories of the three women are inter­cut, formally (by editing) and actually (in rela­tion to the storyteller, in the intersection of two of the women's lives). But none of the stories/episodes in The Fourth Evidence... and It Depends have a conclusion. Serial nar­ratives are also episodic. The Fourth Evi­dence ... and It Depends resemble serial nar­ratives. Sitcoms and soaps are also serial nar­ratives. Each episode in a sitcom relates a story with a conclusion; the episodes in a soap are inconclusive. The characters lend a continuity and their circumstances a meta­physics to the whole: appearance identifies characters while a normative manner of response stabilizes the situational framework. However, in It Depends Isabelle always assumes a different appearance—once she pretended to be a cripple. But in The Fourth Evidence... the protagonists do respond in a normative manner—conventional to their condition.