The Witness
"The Witness" by Rosemary Heather, Spring 2007, pp. 46-49
If the observer effect describes the consequences of observation on the thing observed, the consternation effect is more specific: it refers to the feeling one gets watching video works by the Vancouver-based artist Althea Thauberger—what to make of them?
Thauberger’s art is capable of provoking the extreme discomfort of the sophisticated confronting the naive. This is especially true of Songstress (2001–02), the work that first brought the artist wide attention. Songstress has all the hallmarks of Thauberger’s art practice, which consists of creating portraits of social groups by initiating collaboration with them. The project began with an advertisement Thauberger placed in a Victoria newspaper seeking young female singer/songwriters. Much has been written about the mawkish artwork that resulted. With the rugged British Columbia landscape as backdrop, each of the girls sings her own original composition. The performances, presented in succession, are all framed differently, but the common range of the sentiments expressed within them means that, in each case, a spectacular setting gets reduced to a sappy mise en scène for a young singer with not particularly original Lilith Fair–like ambitions.
The controversy and consternation occasioned by the work suggested that Thauberger had hit on fertile ground. Opinion was divided: was Thauberger empowering Songstress’s participants or taking advantage of their intentions?
Reid Shier, an early curator of the artist’s work and now director and curator of North Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery, notes that few artists polarize opinion like Thauberger. She has a consistent talent for being on the wrong side of the art viewer’s ability to identify with what they are looking at. Thauberger disrupts the viewer’s childlike desire to be at one with the world and the expectation that artworks—especially in film and video— should be a surrogate for this wish.
Subsequent projects by the artist have had a similar effect. In the video A Memory Lasts Forever (2004), four girls in their late teens or early 20s enact differing versions of a story based on an experience from Thauberger’s own youth. The plot focuses on the death of a family dog, a scenario well-suited to the expression of overwrought emotions. The story is enacted four times, with each girl in turn assuming the duties of dramaturge and librettist and, of course, inhabiting the starring role. Although it has a polished look (brought to the production by a professional crew), the video, like Songstress, is marked by the amateurism of its performances. As Thauberger comments, this leads to the assumption that the subjects of her work “are meant to look somehow foolish.” As the Toronto writer Terence Dick suggests, the uneasiness that arises when we watch the video is due to a suspicion that the girls do not know how they appear.
Even among art consumers—professionals in the analysis of representation—the hope is that artworks will be pleasing, or at least challenging in ways that we understand. In Thauberger’s work, these expectations are confusingly undermined.
The best developments in art are those motivated by a personal need that somehow connects to wider cultural developments. An obvious frame of reference for Thauberger’s work is the now-ubiquitous genre of reality television. Reality TV is an industry predicated on the exploitation of willing participants, and this is probably what underlies the assumption that Thauberger has similarly dishonourable intentions.
To dismiss her work on these terms, however, is to perpetuate the idea that when it comes to self-representation, distinctions between professional and amateur—and indeed between high and low art—should be maintained. But look beyond the surface of these works and the narratives informing the popular imagination become apparent. These include not only aspirations to stardom, but also assumptions about which occasions permit the expression of true emotion, and what kind of sentiments are appropriate, expected even, at those times. Viewers of Thauberger’s works who balk at the stereotypical content of their performances expose another set of stereotypes: the expectation that performers should conform to mass media–fostered norms of what singers should look and sound like. In this way, critics of Thauberger’s work reveal themselves to be, like the girls in Songstress, utterly conventional in their desires.
Her project Murphy Canyon Choir (2005) is especially revealing in this respect. Commissioned by in Site, a binational network that features works set in the region of San Diego and Tijuana, its impoverished, cross-border counterpart, Thauberger proposed to collaborate with families from San Diego’s huge military community. Her proposal initially met with, she says, an “ambivalent reaction”: inSite didn’t know how to position the project ideologically. In her statement, Thauberger writes that Murphy Canyon is the largest military-housing complex in the world, but the city’s military population “remains quite invisible…especially to the educated and affluent.”
Over a period of five months, Thauberger and a local choir director and choral composer worked with eight military spouses to compose an original repertoire of songs they then performed in a school auditorium in Murphy Canyon. While the work was in production, many of the women, all of whom were in their 20s, confided in Thauberger about the difficulty of being left to raise children alone while their husbands were deployed overseas, often to an uncertain fate. In spite of this, the women authored songs that were sentimental and patriotic. Titles such as Wife of a Hero, Waiting and The Story of Love give some indication of the group’s collective view of their circumstances, as well as their ideas about how their feelings should be properly expressed. When an art audience from central San Diego was bused in for the performance, two largely ideologically opposed worlds were brought together, creating a dynamic, emotionally charged situation. The idea that artworks can push boundaries is a commonplace— if not a cliché—of the business, but Thauberger breached tangible divisions by insisting on re-examining assumptions about which communities are worthy of the art world’s attention. As a result, the project helped to expand the two communities’ awareness of each other.
Thauberger has said that she sees her work as creating “a situation of witness.” It is a curious hope to have for art that implicates the viewer morally in terms of a responsibility for what one is looking at. This is true even as Thauberger’s chosen mode of working, community collaboration, is on the leading edge of contemporary art practice. This trend’s best-known exponents are the British artists Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller and Gillian Wearing and the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, although their respective practices are all quite different from one another.
Writing about the phenomenon of social collaboration in Artforum, Claire Bishop characterizes it as today’s avant-garde, a practice that carries on the modernist call “to blur art and life.” This provides a poor description of Thauberger’s work. She may share with this type of practice a desire to find a wider relevance for art, but her interest is in revealing, not blurring, boundaries, especially as they come to define different social groups. Her primary concern is not to aestheticize a social relationship, or to use the social sphere—real people—as the material for art (both typical approaches of the artistic enterprise generally known as “relational aesthetics”). Rather, Thauberger seems to have a preoccupation with using the entire apparatus of art to examine the extremely complex relationship that people now have with the realm of direct experience. A still-relevant analysis of this condition is found in the French philosopher Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle, which was published in 1967. In Debord’s succinct characterization, “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
Today, direct experience tends to be refracted—“lived” as it were—through its representation. Thauberger shows us the truth of this reality by making artwork that refers to pop genres, like rock videos or musical theatre, but doing so on terms that ensure basic aspects of their conventions will not be met.
Real people do not look or act the way that “real people” do on TV and in the cinema. Maybe this is the true subject of Thauberger’s art: failure to meet the conventions of the real as representation makes what she does difficult to look at. In Thauberger’s terms, wishing that the real looked better than it does betrays one’s “complicity with popular forms of representation.”
However, given the care that Thauberger takes to use highly skilled technical crews to facilitate her collaborations, this stance is somewhat disingenuous. The high production values expose the singers’ inadequacies. As Shier notes, “The performances oppose the standards that the production values augur.” He argues that making works that aspire to industry standards is a mark of the artist’s seriousness and conveys her respect for the performers’ intentions. Still, giving her works a professional gloss sets up an expectation in the viewer that her novice performers will inevitably disappoint.
Thauberger says that she hopes her work sets up the conditions for identification, in effect helping the viewer to break through conventional expectations to enable some form of authentic experience. Empathy, even when expressed negatively, is a real emotion. Confirming that the works are “too real” for easy consumption is a measure of their success, for the artist seeks empowerment for her subjects on their own terms. Creating contexts where people can perform and express themselves gives them visibility and a certain kind of autonomy.
In her most recent project, completed during a year-long artist residency in Berlin, Thauberger collaborated with eight young men in the city who, in lieu of nine months of obligatory military service, had opted to enter an alternative civilian service. The authorities at the Zivildienst, a rather shopworn institution in Germany at this point, approved the artist’s proposal as an official project, which attracted the interest of those conscriptees with performing ambitions. The collaboration resulted in a theatrical performance and video based on fictitious characters the participants had developed in improvisation exercises. By making the production open to the public and exhibiting the work in the location where it was shot—the chapel of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (home to the international artist residency in which Thauberger was a participant)—she made visible to the public the conditions under which her productions take place. It was the logical next step in her ongoing project of using the mechanisms of representation as the means of their own demystification.
This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by the Fraser Elliott Foundation in memory of Betty Ann Elliott.
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