Peter Kingstone
"Peter Kingstone" by Jon Davies, Winter 2008, pp. 188-120
Peter Kingstone’s latest project finesses the Toronto artist’s long-standing fascination with the place where autobiographical fact ends and narrative fiction begins. In the past, Kingstone has passed artifice off as documentary by parroting the codes of first-person representation, but with this work, 100 Stories About My Grandmother, the only lie is his claim that the impossibly dense archive of stories he invites us to sift through are all about “my”—his—grandmother.
Building on its companion piece, 2006’s Charles L. Roberts: The War Years—an accumulation of video fictions and artifacts that supposedly charted Kingstone’s grandfather’s military experience—the artist’s latest work was partly inspired by one of his grandmother’s many occupations: sex-trade worker.
Kingstone’s project involved hiring 100 male prostitutes in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Miami and London. The transaction entailed not sex but instead the recitation of a story about each’s grandmother. The resulting talking-head recordings are arranged very straightforwardly and add up to more than six hours of oration, constructing one archetypal granny. At Gallery TPW, the project was displayed on four TV monitors, each nestled within a mock-up of a cozy living room—complete with bowls of candy—creating a surprisingly warm and intimate, if surreal, domestic space. One wall bore the names of all the participants, writ large as on a war memorial or other lofty monument.
Not having known his grandmother, Kingstone suggests that each one of these men’s stories could just as easily be about her. He appropriates them into a speculative portrait of his own mysterious ancestor, and this absent woman haunts the entire archive.
The men’s reminiscences run the gamut (as do the men), adding up to an eclectic collective portrait of a profession—with very little editing or editorializing on Kingstone’s part. Most of the narrators are awkward, some are consummate performers and others are simply boring. They are sociopaths, saints and everything in between, but they are all grandsons. The grandma becomes an oblique means of representing the self: the longer the men talk, the more you feel you know them, despite knowing they are all paid performers. The project’s magnification of the minutiae of ordinary lives into art and its encapsulation of complex individuals in a few moments of screen time remind one of the promise of publicity offered by reality television. Some men clearly use the opportunity to advertise their bodies.
The whole project might be seen as a take on prostitutes’ vital roles as conversationalists, therapists, consolers. Through its conceptual artifice, it becomes a very open, generous and convivial work to enter into—the “my” of the title a possessive pronoun shared by everyone involved: artist, participants and viewers—with Kingstone, behind the scenes, subtly spinning myth from the mundane.
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