Gisele Amantea: Tracing A History
How to tell the story? That will be the hardest part. Florence Lassandro, at age 22, was the only woman hanged for murder in Alberta and one of the last women executed in Canada. She is a tragic figure in a drama peopled by what might seem, from a distance at least, to be stock B-movie characters. It would be all too easy to sensationalize or romanticize her plight, and artist Gisele Amantea does not want to do either. That much has already been done. But the circumstances that led a young, female, Italian immigrant, neé Filumena Costanzo, to run afoul of the law in the Crowsnest Pass during Prohibition and the days of rum-running are cloudy at best.
The one eyewitness at the trial was nine years old. The events are further distorted by time, innuendo, the vagaries of memory, cultural stereotypes and writers of pulp-fiction romances and true-crime stories. Amantea heard the stories about the Italian communities in the mining towns of the Crowsnest as a child, in Calgary, from her father Jack. He was born and grew up in Fernie, British Columbia, where Florence was from. It is not far from the storys two key Alberta towns: Coleman, the scene of the murder of the policeman whom Florence and the bootlegger Emilio Picariello were convicted of shooting, and Blairmore, where they lived with their separate families in Emperor Pics hotel.
Where to begin? Amantea has first to reconstruct the story through research, which she does slowly over a long period, nearly ten years. She has then to retell, as a historical narrative, the story of Lassandro and Picariello, who were hanged on May 2, 1923. To be understood, the narrative has to be replete with its historical setting and social, political and cultural context, critical elements so often missing from the romances. Once she has amassed the pages of notes and the hundreds of photographs, she still has to find the appropriate form for themone that accounts for the ways that popular culture affects the construction of memory and identity, creating myths through genres like the gangster film and epics like The Godfather, or romance novels like The Bootleggers Bride.
I had this little revelation that you cant talk about Italians in the 1920s without looking at all these things that have already been made, says the Montreal-based artist. In doing the research, I saw that the retelling of the story of Florence and Pic was embedded with these myths. Thats what made me want to include these kinds of visual references. You are understanding this story through these other kinds of narratives.
The form Amantea chose for the storythe comic bookis brilliantly simple and capable of great complexity in combining pictures and words. Completed in 2002, The King v. Picariello and Lassandro arises almost entirely from visual culture, with the images guiding the text. Originally made for the Dunlop Art Gallery, which is housed in the Regina Public Library, Amanteas absorbing, innovative installation, shown first last fall, draws upon all the kinds of materials found in a contemporary library and archive collection, from printed ephemera, pamphlets, newspapers and books to videos of motion pictures.
By pointing to the exhibition site itself as a storage house of information, Amantea took the notion of the site-specific work to a deeper level. This isnt to say, of course, that her research materials came from the Regina library, but that the library and archive stand as a metaphor for history and memory, the two forces that drive the installations inner workings. Making it, in fact, has been a labour of love that she dedicates, in conversation, to her storytelling father, whose mother, Maria Marasco, immigrated to Canada via Ellis Island. She landed on Boxing Day, 1902. The List of Alien Immigrants for the Commissioner of Immigration, which records her arrival, is represented on page 1 of the work, which acknowledges the difficult circumstances of an immigrants life.
The King v. Picariello and Lassandro is made up of 14 huge comic-book pages and reproductions of photographs of the storys main protagonists (Florence is represented by police mug shots). The comic-book pages, each 77 inches high by 55 inches wide, encircle a gallery on three sides. They present the story in varying arrangements of panels, through which it unfolds in time. Among the sources Amantea has used are her own family photographs, a recipe for the holiday cake pizzachiusa, archival photographs, maps, postcards, a copy of a prescription required for the legal purchase of liquor, movie stills, newspaper clippings, ephemera, government documents and letters, personal letters, courtroom exhibits, transcripts of the murder trial, pages from the appeals and a petition for clemency.
Amantea mines the archive, as a good postmodernist might say, in a way that curators of museum exhibitions but few artists have begun to do. She assembles the widest possible array of materials to show the many sides of one subject. Moreover, her concern isnt with aesthetic classifications like high or low, but with the significance of an image, text or object as the powerful, concrete product of representational practices. The comic book, which not only combines pictures and words but is a signifying object in itself, fits the bill.
Despite its flexibility of form and content, comic books are usually relegated to the bottom of the scale as a devalued, lowbrow form. This is the territory in which Amantea has positioned all of her work. She embraces emblems of kitsch and popular cultureflocking, flocked wallpaper, water globes, ceramic figurines, artificial flowersand transforms them in installations of surpassing material richness and beauty. The pages of her oversized comic book are both in keeping with her concerns and a departure from her previous work. The beauty of the black-and-white pages is stark, befitting their subject. And, although she has used found textsreal letters written by women in distressshe has never before composed a narrative. When she decided to begin the project, she looked at a lot of comic books.
The idea initially came when she read the Canadian comic books Nelvana of the Northern Lights and Super Shamou (featuring the first Inuit superhero), in which the mainstream comic-book form is used to treat alternative content. Art Spiegelmans artful two-volume Maus, which addresses the Holocaust, provided a model of the comic book as a tension-filled vehicle for serious historical content. Maus demonstrates also that different types and styles of visual materials can be integrated on the page by translating them into drawing. Joe Saccos two-volume Palestine weds reportage and the comic book to deal with complex historical and political themes. David Colliers biographies of Canadian figures like Grey Owl, Olympic athlete Ethel Catherwood and the wrongfully convicted David Milgaard, produced in Montreal by graphic-arts publisher Drawn & Quarterly, offer precedents for treating anti-heroes in Canadian history in short-story formats. Julie Doucet, another of the Drawn & Quarterly artists, deals with gender issues through stories about her own life and relationships.
Within the comic-book structure, Amantea presents images as texts and texts as images, constantly erasing the distinctions between them to create the composite, synthetic form that the American literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell dubs imagetext. She has done this before in her large letter pieces of the 1990s, Mable K., Dear Andy and August the Sixteenth, 1984, and in the postcard piece Burns Lake, 1967. The handwritten text of each missive constitutes the works image. But Amantea differs most from the comic-book artists in that she doesnt draw. She traces selected images and later resizes, cuts out and assembles them with the computer into final pages.
The tracings have a certain transparency that allows for reading through the drawing, so that the underlying source is always invoked. Tracing unifies the differences and contradictions of the image sources without suppressing them. It connects the traced images to the handwritten texts that appear underneath or beside them in blocks. The idiosyncrasies of the process create a visual analogue of anecdotal, personal and oral histories. Where the comic-book pages contain echoes of the scrapbook in the direct representation of newspaper clippings, a petition, appeals and trial documents, the difference between personal voice and authoritative official record becomes acute and poignant. Most importantly, through the act of tracing, Amantea represents representation as a process. She highlights the fact that it is never simply neutral or without a program or a point of view.
The imagetext, which contains an amazing amount of engrossing detail, performs on many levels: the personal, the social and the political; the historical, the fictional and the romantic fantasy; the expository, the documentary and the cinematic. Pages 1 and 2, akin to the establishing shots in a film, begin the story with immigration, the development of coal-mining towns like Fernie and the immigrant labourers life in the mines. Among the images are a panorama of the Rocky Mountain town, Stieglitzs famous photograph The Steerage, Amanteas grandparents tiny wood-frame house, a cut-and-fold miners house, an aerial view marked to show the neighbourhoods of segregated ethnic groups and the yawning interior of a mine.
On all of the pages, relationships among the images are telling. Florence, married off at age 14, and Picariello, the big, charming, local patron who employs her husband, are introduced on pages 3 and 4. Amantea connects the hapless girl to the experiences of her own family with a composite photograph (in it, her father is still a boy) that puts Amanteas in Canada and in Italy together under a statue of the Virgin, a recipe for a family Christmas cake and snapshots of her mothers family on a picnic in Banff at which a bear suddenly appears. These images clearly are different from adjacent film stills taken from Nancy Savocas Household Saints (1993), which are also linked to family lore. Like one of the characters in Savocas film, an aunt of Amanteas was wagered and lost in a card game.
On Picariellos page, he and Florences husband, his close associate, hold opposite ends of a chain attached to a bear cub, a metaphor perhaps for Florences predicament. At the centre of the page is Pic, the family man. Below we see his Blairmore hotel, his four sons and his fast car, a McLaughlin known as a Whiskey Six because of its popularity with bootleggers. There are also images of Al Capone, Robert De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America and stills from other movies: Racket Busters, Bonnie and Clyde, The Roaring Twenties. Amantea captures the colour of the period and, at the same time, shows how and why it comes to be perceived as colourful through representation.
Immediately following is page 5, Labour & Racism. Colour and origin become an issue of difference and Amantea offers example after example of brutally blunt racism taken from official documents, with images of ethnic cowboys by Chinese photographer C. D. Hoy and miners gathered under a banner proclaiming Karl Marx Park. Florences relationships, on page 6, are represented entirely through images of women in filmsPublic Enemy, The Lady from Shanghai, Bonnie and Clyde, Scarface that underline the ease with which she was assumed to be a seductress, a mistress of either Pic or his son and a willing accomplice. The comical Roaring Twenties side of Prohibition, page 7, is juxtaposed on page 8 with the creation of the Alberta Provincial Police, known as the dry squad. The victim, Constable Stephen Oldacres Lawson, who was shot by either Florence or Pic, was a member of the APP. The shooting, page 9, is a gripping, cinematic page in which the action unfolds with images of Al Pacino, Faye Dunaway, Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck. After this, newspapers and documents, which betray a miscarriage of justice and biases against Italians with alarming transparency, carry the tale to its climax in The Hanging.
Three of Amanteas works preceding The King v. Picariello and Lassandro dealt with some of its themes individually. The magical In Your Dreams (1998), an installation of 31 water globes containing miniature TV reflections of a three-channel video, treats the formation of female identity in and through the movies. Do I What? (1999), a wallpaper installation with a flocked pattern of Chantilly lace in reference to the Big Bopper, touches upon the cultural creation of feminine mystique. Barrière (2001), a wallpaper installation flocked with the image of a high chain-link fence, points to the encroachment of public institutions on private life. That the succinct, distilled, emblematic Barrière should be followed by the intricate complexities of The King v. Picariello and Lassandro, a work that requires and rewards close reading, comes as a surprise. But why? For most of her career, Amantea has shown an unerring sense for the perfect and completely unexpected form.
It would be far more predictable, perhaps, to turn Florences dramatic story into an opera called Filumena, as composer John Estacio and librettist John Murrell have done. Filumena, which premiered in February, is the first original opera mounted by the Calgary Opera. But Amantea thinks that its use of the name that Florence shed in North America simplifies her identity and her situation. When Filumena is being performed at the Banff Centre this August, The King v. Picariello and Lassandro will be in a show at the centres Walter Phillips Gallery. And two forms of representational practice, which look at the same subject from different points of view, will be juxtaposed with all their similarities and contradictions.
Spring 2003
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