Paulette Phillips Geoffrey Shea, YYZ, October 25 - November 14

by Andrew Patterson

Work is the punning title of Paulette Phillips and Geoffrey Shea's new videotape. While the two have collaborated on numerous occasions, they have just as often worked independently. In collaboration or alone, they have often played with notions of genre construction and deconstruction. In // Depends, for instance, Phillips superimposed fictional narratives of her own construction onto people whose daily movements intrigued her. Shea's work has frequently referred to the documentary form, which upon a closer scrutiny reveals itself to be a barely-disguised fiction. These strategies, and a few more, are thrown into the pair's latest work.

According to Shea: "Work takes our social myths about employment as a starting point in an enquiry about normalcy." Questions of 'normalcy' are raised immediately at the tape's outset. We see a man (John Porter) depart from his very modest bed-sitter apartment and walk out into the streets to buy a morning newspaper. It is snowing outside but he is wearing his slippers which he continues to wear throughout the tape. He returns to his building and in the hallway walks past a wild-eyed young man (Greg Woodbury) who is his next-door neighbour. On the radio, we hear a woman's matter-of-fact monotonous voice reciting a newscast which consists of nothing but one-sentence headlines, the radio equivalent of the 24-hour television news channel's cyclically repeated bulletins that effectively rob world events of any dynamics or emotional content.

By virtue of its title, Work refers also to the vocabulary of the social realists who, of course, have always distrusted fiction. The use of street and other public locations, as well as the career option tapes within Work, make reference to social-realist documentary and educational television programmes. However, the technique of following subjects as they go about their daily routines moves Work towards a neo-proletarian Days of Our Lives. Economic concerns have traditionally been concealed in the soaps where the characters are predominantly part of the 'solid' middle-class. To be employed, or actively seeking employment, is not necessarily 'normal' for working-class individuals, it is absolutely essential unless a person can skillfully manipulate loopholes within the welfare system. Another technique for avoiding work is to exist as an economic parasite, feeding on the labour and good will of others. The most powerful manipulators of this technique defer to religion, the anti-rational, or the supernatural.

Religion, along with labour and insanity, is the other persistent motif that runs through Work. The wild-eyed young man lurking in the hallway at the beginning of the tape is revealed to be the newscaster's younger brother. He lip-syncs to omnipotent televangelists; he also has redemptive dreams in which his sister appears as a white-clad Madonna figure. The Porter character is also intersected by various bearers of the faith; first on a streetcar by an evangelist who considers unemployed people to be fortunate, and next by a career option monologuist who was floundering until she found her most satisfying job God.

Yet blind faith is not the only way to avoid pavement pounding, waiting in line, and all the other headaches of the job search. The art world, for example, has always romanticized and sheltered those for whom the mundanity of the 'practical', the 'rational', or simply linear has become impossible. There have always been financially successful individuals who are aware that they have 'lost it'. They are nonetheless capable of channelling their inabilities into such sometimes fashionable artistic possibilities as 'experimental' narrative, or even commodity-art forms in which a visual 'poetry' for its own sake overshadows or completely usurps any issue of content. There is considerable wealth in seeming to be many different things to many different people and therefore being comfortable to the general public. Work's newscaster/big-sister character (Paulette Phillips) is, at the beginning of the tape, reducing all potential news stories to neutralized headlines. But the next time she is heard, and the first time she is seen, she is wandering into the area of psychobabble. She has progressed from editing facts and implying fiction to filtering a personal fiction into the bed-sitters of strangers.

The narratives of the Woodbury and Phillips characters do not become prominent nor do they intersect with the Porter character until at least halfway through the tape. Porter, who would like to have a career instead of merely a bread-and-butter job, lives the grindingly repetitious life of a job-seeker. He visits Manpower centres, scans the want ads, rides the streetcar, has a drink with a buddy in a Parkdale country 'n' western bar, and leads a typical National Film Board/CBC proletarian lifestyle except for the omnipresent slippers and the fact that he calls a potential employer and expects to receive a return call on a public phone labelled "equipped for outgoing calls only". His lifestyle is recorded in both follow-the-subject documentary style and as a realistic character projected in front of and in contrast to career fantasies. This unaffected man exists mostly in real-life locations where he is encountered by different supporting characters whose entrances seem spontaneous because of the highly effective employment of natural lighting and ambient sound. By self-consciously creating this illusion of spontaneity, Shea and Phillips are playing around with the boundaries of both video verite and straightforward narrative fiction. The results are mixed. Is Work attempting to expose the docu-drama as being just another variation of the soap-opera format or is this blurring simply the result of the intersection of Phillips and Shea's conflicting points-of-view and different styles of work?

Another aspect of the tape, which walks a fine line between realism and overfamiliar fiction, lies in its deployment of actors or performers. The various 'street' or non-video-community recognizable faces, with the exception of the career option monologists, belong to professional actors who have the ability to convince a viewing public that they are actually the characters whose roles they are playing. This tradition of 'naturalistic' or 'realistic' acting is markedly different from the iconic, self-conscious role-parodying which has for so long been a mainstay of narrative video art. Work begs the authenticity of video verite by employing professional actors to portray stereotypical characters better suited to the afternoon delights than to any form of realistic narrative.

These stereotypes call into question the top half of the tape's extended veneer of documentary realism. If Shea and Phillips intended the use of these familiarly fictitious characters to intrude upon and question the entire validity of the docu-drama or indeed any form of social realism, then their genre-juggling makes some sense. If they have intended to play havoc with viewers' preconceptions of spontaneity, deliberation, naturalism, and affectation, they have indeed succeeded. Despite the tape's indisputable seamlessness and facility, however, I am not sure just how intentional the pair's genre blurring is, and how much of it actually springs from a delicate balancing of different narrative voices.