Rita McKeough: Subversive at Work
"Subversive at Work" by Diana Sherlock, Winter 2010, pp. 108-113
“You don’t separate your work and your life,” Rita McKeough says. It is a lesson that the Calgary- and Halifax-based artist, educator and musician learned early on, from her former teacher, the Calgary artist John Will. Like Will, McKeough responds to the world around her and tries to reshape it. This is why she, too, has become an influential role model and mentor, who inspires colleagues and encourages younger artists.
McKeough has called herself “a doer,” which is an apt phrase considering her 30 years of energetic art practice and her participation in independent music, artist-run culture, community radio and activism. A Governor General’s Award–winner, McKeough has taught in art programs across Canada, including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in her home province and, since 2007, the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.
As an artist and educator, McKeough believes that her primary purpose is to establish conditions that foster dialogue and assist artists in developing their voices through their work. “In my work, it’s not about speaking for anybody, but wanting to create or imagine situations or a society where everyone has a voice and speaks from his or her own position,” she says. Her artistic and teaching practices start with a belief in what the theorist and educator Carol Becker calls “the subversive potential of art”—the possibility that when artists engage in ethical actions in their art and their communities, they can affect positive social change. McKeough teaches from personal experience and, similarly, she encourages her students to value and share their own diverse perspectives by making art. Her teaching method relies on cultivating a reciprocal dialogue between herself and her students. “What’s super-important to me about teaching is what you gain from the students,” she says. “We build something in conversation all the time.”
McKeough also works collaboratively with artist-peers (many of whom are former students) to produce interactive installations and performances that often address marginalized points-of-view. Early prints from the 1970s offered a lexicon of bold, playful, cartoonish imagery of doting mittens, trembling houses and whirling clock faces that recur in her more recent work, in which animated everyday objects function as signs of the disenfranchised. Best known for large-scale multimedia performances and installations with experimental sound and electronics, McKeough’s works consistently address social and environmental issues that range from domestic violence to urban sprawl.
Wilderment (2010), her most recent installation, is a seemingly endless field of robotic construction cranes. They sway in waves to strip the prairie and make room for residential development. Piles of miniaturized cement houses, a McKeough leitmotif, line the edges of the installation and recall earlier works she produced while living in Calgary during the oil boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Defunct (1981) and Destruck (1983), McKeough constructed, altered and eventually destroyed large-scale models of houses over the course of exhibitions, in reference to the social effects of the era’s corporate development of inner-city residential neighbourhoods. These, and works like Afterland Plaza (1985), Retaining Wall (1987) and Tremor (1989), presented anthropomorphized domestic architectures as sites of agency and voice in order to collapse gendered modernist dichotomies of urban/rural, human/nature and social/personal.
During the 1990s, McKeough created several large-scale, theatrical multimedia performances that involved energetic casts of collaborators. In these performances, she punctured conventional structures of architecture, language and the body in order to address societal gender and class limitations. Inspired by the French feminist writers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray—and her hero, the punk icon Patti Smith—McKeough’s 90-minute, anxiety-ridden operatic performance In bocca al lupo—In the mouth of the wolf (1991–92) gave collective voice to women’s anger and the silences of patriarchal discourse. In Take it to the Teeth (1993) at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, McKeough and the performance artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle literally chewed through the museum walls over the course of 45 days. As they chewed, they excavated speakers through which muffled voices told the histories repressed by modernity and its instrument—the museum. Paying particular homage to Cixous, McKeough’s Tower of Silence (2000) also brought the power of women’s voices to the pauses, gaps, stutters and silences of language as a troop of women performers engaged in song while scaling a gigantic, H-shaped scaffold in front of a ruined Trappist monastery at the St. Norbert Arts Centre in Winnipeg. Tower of Silence was one more instance of McKeough’s method of obscuring one thing to see another—a process of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing that signifies an ongoing struggle for agency and social power.
More recently, McKeough has moved away from performances that rely on theatrical staging, movements or gestures. While her works continue to create space for dialogue and action, they now investigate what she describes as “the potential of a relationship to the performing object.” Outskirts (2003), slipping by (2005) and Alternator (2008–09) create a balance and equivalency between the artist and the objects with which she performs. Thematically, Outskirts and Alternator address the difficulty in slowing down or reversing capitalist exploitation’s devastating effects on the natural world. Cast in the role of steward and clad in protective gear, McKeough is a figure who attends to dangerous things in a supportive role. She becomes the maintenance worker who completes arduous, repetitive tasks—refilling a cigarette butt–flinging catapult, steering a robotic car frame with the weight of her body, hand-cranking a generator to drive miniature oil pumps—to keep the artworks running.
In these works, the artist and her objects are jointly responsible for the action’s completion. They exist to suggest a co-relational ethic is necessary to limit oppression and exploitation. slipping by culminated in a performance where McKeough hung by a harness in Calgary’s Stride Gallery space for an hour. She hung as still as possible, while the audience interacted with a set of wailing, motion-sensored, whirling clock faces. The audience also controlled the duration of the performance: time was counted, minute by minute, as each person entered the space. In this brave and vulnerable act, McKeough quietly resisted submitting to the frenetic pace of urban time. She explains her dedication to durational performance as an attempt to form a reciprocal bond with her audiences. “The harder it is for me, the more I feel I give of myself, to show my appreciation for the audience,” she says. “I give to you, and you stop and look at the work and think about it, talk about it. It’s an exchange.”
Clearly, McKeough has a way with things; she cultivates a certain intimacy with objects. Curator Annette Hurtig has said that McKeough’s objects have a “sensate subjectivity.” In his essay “Thing Theory,” the literary theorist Bill Brown describes the thingness of objects as the moment when an object asserts itself and becomes excessive or demands some sort of encounter. To become things, objects must possess agency, and it is agency that McKeough lends to hers. The elements in her works interrupt passivity and change the terms of encounter. Like Georges Bataille’s l’informe (formlessness), thingness is always in transition, always forming. Recognition only comes from a relation to a function or a task. McKeough’s performative relationship with objects could be understood as a public thinking about thingness. Her recent works blur the boundaries between things in an attempt to negotiate the condition of otherness that separates one thing from another. McKeough performs in order to confront herself as a thing among things, and to examine expressions of possession, control and power.
McKeough remains optimistic about the subversive—perhaps even revolutionary—potential of art and teaching, even in an era of market-driven, corporate education. In her sculpture, performance and interactive art classes, she asks her students the same questions that she asks herself: How do inanimate objects constitute human subjects within the social realm? What do we give of ourselves when we make things? How does this change us and the ways in which we relate to the world?
“I come from an older model and still teach partially from within that model, which is one based in experiencing the educational experience as opposed to consuming it,” she says. “There is openness to the lack of expectation, which allows the student to be freer.” Just as the power of the art object is in its thingness—its ability to animate a transition between states—McKeough’s approach to art education empowers students to destabilize existing ideologies through dialogue. The making of art demands that the artist engage both risk and responsibility, and so McKeough encourages her students to be self-reflexive, critical thinkers who create work that is responsive to their audiences and social contexts.
“The things that I see as important are things like risk, experimentation, freedom, possibility, eliminating fear and the ability to take action. It’s not passive in any way; students aren’t waiting to be given anything. They react, they think, they act and they take responsibility. I think that is particularly my practice. It might not be everyone’s attitude, but you have to take responsibility for what your work is.”
McKeough’s approach to art education and to art-making, then, is not about producing objects; it is, rather, about helping to create critical thinkers. In art, perhaps more than any other activity, you become what you do—and this is precisely its transformative potential.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Diana Sherlock and Rita McKeough dedicate this article to the memory of Jasmine Valentina Herron (1987–2010), an artist, friend and former student “whose eloquent voice was silenced too soon.”
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