Just Kidding
A high school confidential on the fine art of passing notes
"I just killed my best friend!" gasps Veronica.
"And your worst enemy," declares JD.
"Same difference," she moans.
It comes as no surprise that Heathers is one of Kyla Mallett's favourite films. A cinematic touchstone for a whole generation of young women, Heathers acts out disturbing yet familiar behaviours. Like Heathers, Mallett's new photographs introduce us to the clandestine politics of popular girl cliques. Unlike the letters of historical figures, the often unsigned and anonymous notes acknowledge the unacknowledged. She recovers juvenilia from her friends' and colleagues' personal collections and delivers them from their anonymity by fashioning portraits of teenage girls through large-scale photographs of this written correspondence. The photographs illustrate the girls' attempts to communicate with one another. Mallett raises an important issue about authorship with her new work. How can girls learn to develop a voice when, as one expert has recently written, "Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of the female experience"? Developing further conceptual aspects of her previous work, Bully (2003), Mallett brings to our attention the potential for suffering inflicted upon girls by their so-called friends.
Formally, Mallett's photographs resemble conceptual art practices of the 1960s. Mallett refers to the "dry" forms and logical processes of conceptual art to capture the illogical transactions and emotional elusiveness of the teenage girl's note. The impact of the notes hinges on the girls' longing for a communication with one another that is ultimately impossible. The painstaking use of colour in Your Pal Alicia (2004), Hello!!! (2004) and See ya! (2004), for instance, is completely at odds with their contents. Your Pal Alicia (2004) is an elaborate note with multicoloured text spiralling towards a flowered centre. In notes trimmed with hearts and flowers, and executed with bravura and flourishes, the girls hide their negative emotions by covering them with outward displays of prettiness. They articulate the girls' apathy, discontent and indifference towards authority and the institution of learning. It is remarkable that in spite of the feminist revolution that took place more than 30 years ago, young women today still feel society is largely indifferent to their needs. No wonder the intricately folded and ominously addressed note You know who you are (2004) unfurls to begin with the familiar refrain: "Hi, I'm totally bored right now."
What binds this series together, apart from the girls' attempts to assert themselves through passive-aggressive acts of defiance in the forum of the classroom, is how much teenage girls are the product of an ongoing dialogue with their peers. What resonates for the viewer is just how oblique, circuitous and fearful these exchanges are. "I hate writing notes," states the anonymous author of You know who you are, "because I can never say any thing exciting cause it may get around or something." Mallett's photographs uncover the kind of friendship that develops under circumstances when speaking directly, honestly and openly is not an option.
"Technically I guess this makes you my best friend," the author of Oh - where do I start (2004) professes. Why, one must ask, does the author qualify their friendship in this way? Why is she desperate to convince herself of their relationship, in spite of the fact that they have been driving each other "crazy" and engaging in shouting matches? Here the author protests too much, stating that her friend is indisputably "one of the raddest people I've ever met," someone from whom she does not have to hide her feelings. Nevertheless she cautions her friend, "And don't expect me to shut up about the bad driving comments because 1) it's my nature 2) you shouldn't be on the road." Defending her negativity by attributing it to her essential nature, she shows the correspondents hopelessly deadlocked. The survival of the supposed friendship has become contingent upon submission to emotional and psychological abuses.
Such correspondence between teenage girls frustrates any expectation of direct communication, so we must be prepared to read between the lines. If we do, we will see how cruelty regularly unfolds under a cover of intimacy. Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, looks at the alternative or unconventional aggressions that girls resort to when bullying. She observes how "The word bully evokes the image of an enemy, not an intimate, and yet it is often the closest girlfriends who are caught in protracted episodes of emotional abuse." Simmons maps out a host of non-physical, indirect and covert behaviours: non-verbal gesturing, ganging up, behind- the-back talking, rumour-spreading, exiling of cliques, the silent treatment and note-passing are some of the alternatives girls employ to express their anger, jealousy and competitive desires.
Bye (2004), for example, occupies a strange place between real-life murder schemes and the cinematic inventions of films like Heathers. In this note, the author goes from hoping her friend's grandparents will have "simotanious [sic] strokes" to detailing her fantasies about killing Jesse's grandparents so that she and her friends may take possession of their house to party. "Lets get so drunk & kill them...Or all three of us can try & rape her grandpa in the hot tub, he'll have a heart attack & we'll accidentally bury grandma too - 1 dead - 1 still alive - It'll be fun." The author even suggests the potential benefits: they will lose weight by digging the graves. These scenarios, while disturbing to read, are critical to an understanding of the female psyche. Girls are not made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but are in fact capable of bad thoughts, worse behaviours and potentially heinous crimes. The notes are so horrifying that they undercut any utopian vision of a girls-only society. Mallett's portraits refuse to idealize female relationships or imply that girls' lives are idyllic or free of impulses toward competition, desire or even murder.
"I don't know what's going on with DUSTIN...Adam just said that he called me a hoar [sic]." Think about the qualities of the ideal girl and then picture the girl no one wants to be—the anti-girl. The anti-girl is the polar opposite of the "nice" girl; she doesn't blend in, or get along, and she might even be a "hoar."
Photographers often have the difficult task of demonstrating the separation between themselves and the subject of their image. Mallett uses this problem to her advantage, as a way to politicize her work. Unlike the photoconceptualists of the '60s, Mallett makes the formerly repressed element of biography the subject of her work. Rather than engaging with the discourses of the artistic avant-garde, Mallett uses Simmons's sociological study as her point of departure, using Simmons's scholarship to help women arrive at an undiminished understanding of themselves. Mallett's photographs are examples of the complex norms, conventions and rules young women navigate in their relationships with each other and the world at large. While conventional portraits focus on outward physical appearance, Mallett uses the girls' words to paint their portraits, even if these portraits are less than flattering. Mallett's emphasis on the girls' self-incriminating statements give evidence to what can happen when the desire to be nice and to fit in runs counter to real emotions. Without falling back on faux naÏveté or similar tropes, Mallett's portraits reveal the ways young women try to empower themselves. If we listen closely we can hear, beneath impersonal-sounding language and the banal imagery of conceptual art, voices seething with boredom and rage.
"Hi, I'm sorry. Technically, I did not kill Heather Chandler, but hey, who am I trying to kid, right? I just want my high school to be a nice place. Amen. Did that sound bitchy?"
(This essay originally appeared as text for "Artists Curating Artists; Myfanwy MacLeod Curates Kyla Mallett" at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.)
Summer 2004
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
