A Spy in the House of History (with apologies to Anaïs Nin)
"A Spy in the House of History" by R. M. Vaughan, Spring 2009, pp. 52-56
…Training Camp X, suitcases with false backs, parachutes thin as gossamer (the easier to bundle into tree trunks), encryption typewriters, messages in invisible ink inserted into apple cores, blacked-out huts buried deep in secluded woods, false identities and fake passports, dark-eyed seductresses and their masquerades…
The stuff (and sometimes nonsense) of classic espionage fictions, ranging from Joseph Conrad’s novels to countless pulp page-turners and comic books, from cinematic masterpieces to B movies, from tabloid sensationalism to grim government reports (weapons of mass destruction, anyone?)—yet all, in the forgotten histories painstakingly resurrected by the Toronto-based multimedia artist Nina Levitt, brutally, heartbreakingly real.
If the legendary film director Fritz Lang were alive today, he would be a fan of Nina Levitt’s trilogy of spy-versus-spy art installations. The original purveyor of the encrypted-code film, of all things cloak and (bull) dagger, of crisp bulletproof skirts worn under well-shellacked hair and flawlessly tweaked eyebrows, Lang would likely, in the best secret-agent tradition, steal some good ideas too. I doubt Levitt would mind, much.
Since her emergence in the 1980s as a pioneering Canadian second-wave feminist artist, one with a bent for reviving (and radically recontextualizing) popular mid-20th-century representations of lesbian subcultures, Nina Levitt has produced a vast and hugely influential body of work—work that carefully and meticulously explores the contradictions inherent in popular culture’s habit of getting it right by getting it wrong when depicting the lives of women and women-centred cultures. Levitt specializes in turning the male gaze off, in giving the women created for male entertainment their own set of peepers.
In the last few years, however, she has turned her own gaze toward truly hidden, as opposed to merely incorrectly represented, histories: namely, the roles of female spies during the Second World War. In a series of large-scale installations, Levitt has sought to bring these women back to life, to let us literally hear their voices, read their transmitted thoughts and peek into their lairs. It is daring work, given that so little official information exists about these women and that what information is available is often incomplete and/or contested (sometimes by the women themselves).
But Levitt’s spelunking, tiptoeing and snooping has paid off big. If she were actually a spy, she’d get a medal, and a hefty pension, because what she has done with her trilogy of spy shows (“Little Breeze,” shown at several venues, including the Doris McCarthy Gallery, “Thin Air,” at the Koffler Gallery, and “Relay,” at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery) is to (forgive the cliché) bring these women back into the light, back to life. And what vivid lives they lead!
“My spy interest started around 2001,” Levitt tells me in her spacious west-end Toronto studio, “when I was asked to be in a group show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery about Camp X. Camp X, a secret Second World War training camp, is very well known in Oshawa. It’s the claim to fame for Oshawa, besides GM. “I thought, well, that sounds interesting…and the more I read about it the more interested I became.
“My earlier work was all about the absence of women, and here was a perfect place, a place where women were absolutely absent. The only women I found referred to, found records about, were washing dishes and waiting tables. So I started to expand outside of the confi nes of that one particular intelligence camp and I found a ton of information about British women who were trained to do intelligence work far beyond the daily routine—incredibly risky work.”
Wandering around Levitt’s installations, one is struck by how much her heroines achieved with so very little. Many of these women were literally dropped into enemy territory and then left to their own devices. And the devices—fragile portable radios, transmitters held together with copper wire and hope, information memorized but never written down, nylon stockings and penknives— were primitive, even for the time. Travelling light meant escaping death, and one literally lived by one’s wits. Many of these women were caught and executed, and all who volunteered knew this fate was more probable than not.
Levitt communicates the tenuousness, indeed the disposability, of her subjects’ lives by creating works that can literally be carried off or easily dismantled. Her selection of rigged vintage suitcases, which appear in all of the exhibitions, is a perfect example. Battered and scratched, the boxy fibre-and-canvas travel cases look like the kind of luggage your grandmother would have used to cross the Atlantic by ship.
Harmlessly antique, you think, until you pick one up and it starts to speak. Built into each suitcase is a small sound-emitting device and a tiny speaker. In “Thin Air,” we listen to excerpts from an interview with Vera Atkins made in the 1990s, long after the war, wafting out of the speakers, telling you about the dangers, as well as the day-to-day banalities, of life as a spy. Some of the recordings are so faint that you have to hold the suitcase up to your ear—as if you were eavesdropping, putting a drinking glass up against a wall, spying and prying.
The official papers, diary entries and correspondence left behind by the women (what little is left—naturally, many materials were destroyed during the war for safety reasons), as well as Levitt’s own research materials, were displayed like precious illuminated manuscripts, or were reproduced on teletype/telegram- like banners projected on the gallery walls. Levitt’s inflation of such messages is obviously meant to preserve, and to herald, what would otherwise be either wholly lost or buried in musty vaults—but, more important, the reconstructed texts offer us a rare peek into the world view of these brave women. “My entire being is preoccupied with one thing: departure…I would like to inhale enough so as to be able to breathe…,” reads one bluntly poetic text from the diary of Hanna Senesh.
In the second part of her exhibition trilogy, Levitt filled a large gallery with a luminous, silky white parachute, and then placed two high-powered fans underneath the spread. The parachute slowly filled with air, like a weak or aging lung, until it nearly reached the ceiling, pressing viewers up against the gallery walls while looking like a very pretty mushroom cloud.
After filling to capacity, the fans shut off and the parachute slowly released the air, exhaled, until it lay flat on the ground like a shroud. A more fitting memorial to the female agents, who, if they were not direct victims of the war later became victims of the malecentred histories the war generated, I cannot imagine. Each inflation and deflation reminded the viewer of, first, the enormity of the agents’ struggles and, after, the shapeless mess official histories have made of their valiant work.
“I’m really interested in the historical aspect of women during the Second World War,” Levitt states, “who did work that still largely remains either fantasized about, in terms of women’s sexuality and what they were really doing, or was completely hidden from public view.
“When I look for information about women during the war, there’s not a lot there for me, apart from the ‘keeping the home fires burning’ stuff, and nursing, which was obviously really important. For me, though, I was looking for those things that fall in between what’s represented.
“I make work about what’s imaged and imagined. I like seeing how women were represented in the pop culture of the time, and also trying to counter those images. I’m not just critical of what pop culture shows us—I mean, I love that stuff. I just adore it! But I want to try to pair that with things that problematize those representations.”
Sometimes, the problematizations create their own problems.
“I’ve had many older people, people who lived through the war, show up and love the work, but I’ve also had war veterans, male veterans, say, ‘That’s not how it was.’ Basically, they’ve said I created fictions. I also had the curator from the Canadian War Museum tell me that the work is fine and dandy, but it’s not ‘real.’ Because I’m using popular culture, it’s perceived that I’m not representing how it really was. Which is true, in a way, because I can’t ever know how it was. I wasn’t there.
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