Public (E-Journal, York University)

The Meaning of Flux: Discussion 
Janine Marchessault: I'd like to start with a general question. What I 
noticed across all four papers was a relationship between art and every- 
day life. You all talked about it in terms of bringing it into the classroom. 
Warren talked about it in terms of making art education into something 
which is not separated from the rest of the pedagogical program. Johanne 
talked about art and landscape, and Ron talked about it in relation to 
machine and bodies. A couple of weeks ago Larry Grossberg, a cultural 
theorist, was here giving a talk at York University on childhood and he 
talked about the way in which childhood is being represented and recon- 
ceptualised in popular culture as linked to a sense of having no future-as 
a dystopia rather than a utopia-and it seemed to me there was a utopian 
thrust to all your papers. Do you have any thoughts on the function of 
utopia now, how to think about or imagine a future? 
Johanne Sloan: Well, I guess utopia as a concept is difficult to talk about 
in relation to the present era, as compared to say the proto-avant garde of 
the early twentieth century, or the constructivists in Russia, who tried to 
offer a renewed perception and at the same time transform society. They 
regarded certain kinds of habits and gestures, but also shapes and colours, 
as well as forms of social organisations that could be transformed at the 
same time, so that the utopian project became a kind of totalising vision. 
So I'm not sure that whatever kind of idea of utopia that we have now 
can be that kind of utopian vision. I nonetheless do think that there are 
utopian possibilities. There's still a kind of new vision or some kind of 
new bringing together of ideas and images that can be startling andtor 
have that kind of utopian edge. 
Warren Crichlow: My sense is that the question of utopia seems to be the 
most important thing, because when you think about it we're sitting in 
this school, perhaps one of the quintessential examples of utopia. My 
interest in utopia is how utopias always seem to fail. I think it wondrous 
that the Being on Time exhibition is putting that kind of invention into 
art education as a kind of challenge to the notion of utopian culture. But 
what it also suggests is that on the other side of that critique, of the place 
of the sublime, the artist tries to bring it down to the ground to determine 
what possibilities may be left, to imagine something different and to 
incorporate notions of flux. 
Chloe Brushwood Rose: For me looking at new media and the way edu- 
cation has started to respond to technologiesis interesting, not just com- 
puter technologies but also the television and the radio and the airplane.- 
I discovered a book in the library with this picture of a teacher teaching a 
geography lesson on an airplane. Education has always attached these 
hopes and ideas to the technology itself. I think what the exhibit speaks 
to is that although there may be movement, a passage of time, it is not 
necessarily a linear passage. The time the students are in may be very 
troubled. There's a sense that we need to resist the educational impulse to 
only focus on the bright future of the student. This can be a very con- 
flicted impulse. In that sense the work of art may make us face education 
as being conflicted, and not necessarily move us towards a utopia. 
Ron Burnett: The other side of utopia is the imaginary, and the release 
(however often we fail) of that imaginary, the ability to create that space 
where you can allow this to occur. Schools, when they first started, were 
places of imagining. They were places of iconological worship, of ritual. 
They generated carotene kinds of experiences that weren't necessarily lin- 
ear. I use the metaphor of getting on a train, which you board in elemen- 
tary school, and you think "I can't wait to get out!" Then you hit high 
school and you think "Wow! I can't wait to get out of high school." Then 
you enter university-"I can't wait to finish my degree!'' and then you get 
your job and you're watching the clock and you can't wait to get out of 
there and then you die. You spend a lot of time inside someone else's 
assumptions of the imaginary, but really if you focus on this example and 
think about allowing the autonomy of students inside the curriculum, it 
makes sense -let the students make the decisions about where knowledge 
is for them. Let them define how they understand the world around them. 
This notion of recovering self, at least through that momentary, some- 
times epiphanous moment, where you create something that says some- 
thing back to you. 
Johanne: Are you saying that elementary kids should be deciding their 
own curriculum? 
Ron: Absolutely! I'm actually saying that in the elementary classroom the 
students are actually in charge. The teacher is desperately trying to reign 
that in. The teacher is trying to provide information and be the source of 
that information. Meanwhile, the students are all over the place, as they 
should be, trying to figure out what they're doing. 
Johanne: For me that's not something that's very viable, this notion of 
74 Adjust hat 123 
the wild and natural, and that this will make the classroom utopian. 
There's something else which is about the order of social formation and 
the way that we organise information and organise those of kinds of struc- 
tures, and there's a dialectic between the two. We can aim for some kind 
of freedom within the structure that could be considered utopian, rather 
than saying we should be totally free all the time from a very young age. 
Ron: No, I'm not saying that. You know most of the interesting experi- 
ments of the early twentieth century, such as Montessori, are conducted 
around that early stage. In these situations, enough space is created and 
enough time is given over to the exploration by the children, giving them 
a recognition of why they're there that can offset the class in a new direc- 
tion in terms of the choices they make. There is a structure because the 
teacher often has something in mind, but they are definitely far freer. 
Montessori is famous for allowing that freedom early on but then clamp- 
ing down later on the work of the students. You walk into a classroom 
now as a teacher in front of your older students and presume to know 
what they're thinking, and you make the assumption that they will listen 
to what you have to say, whereas the key process is interpersonal. 
Question: Isn't the key process in education that people show up on 
time? It sounds like the problem in education is that people will show up 
on time and they only express themselves in the time that you give them. 
My sense of education was that nothing mattered if you didn't show up 
on time. If you're not in the right class at the right time in the right order, 
only then are you supposed to speak. Education to me is like a penal 
colony. I mean, if I asked any kid, "what's your definition of utopia?" I 
can't imagine any of them would say the classroom. So it seems to me that 
time is really important, and the fact that its not your time, that it's some- 
one else's time your on and not your own, this seems significant to me. 
Chloe: I guess I would respond in that I agree with a lot of what you are 
saying. Yes, there are bells and periods, writing on chalkboards telling 
you where you have to be, people running around from room to room. 
However, I've spent many days in elementary schools conducting my 
research-and I mean I really hadn't been back there since I was eight 
years old-but I actually have to say that I've been really surprised at how 
much free time there is in school. One of the things I'm fascinated by is 
kid culture and how kids resist structural systems. For example, the ways 
in which the playground functions as this amazing unconscious space in 
school, and the exploration of that tension. Although I agree that educa- 
tion in Ontario or Upper Canada was established not so much to educate 
(read) 75 
as to  organise the children, to keep them somewhere and to keep them 
healthy, at the same time I think if you did ask a kid what their sense of 
utopia was it might be skipping class with their friend of sleeping over at 
school. So that there are these kinds of fissures, so that is a kind of dialec- 
tic again. 
Question: Why should all kids show up at the same time? I've heard so 
many discussions over the years about education and the school's curricu- 
lum has never questioned that. As society becomes more delinquent so 
schools become more delinquent. More penal. 
Warren: In the United States there's talk about school as an institution. I 
think the question about students already resenting that aspect of school 
and trying to think of ways to get out of it is accurate. There's an interest- 
ing movement going on in the States called "Education not Incarcera- 
tion," and the question in that movement is no so much about time, about 
being on time, as it is about school not so much educating like a penal 
institution but being displaced by real penal institutions. There was a 
demonstration in Harlem last week protesting an abandoned school being 
turned into a prison. So I think the question of being on time might be 
turned around to ask "Why be on time, to be on time for what?" You will 
never hear the phrase "learn from art," you will really only read the 
phrase "learn about art." This always implies a demand for some kind of 
detachment or distance from the object so that the object is not really 
something that we want to learn from, but just learn about, keeping us as 
far away as possible from the object. So I think when we have exhibitions 
like Being on Time, we can twist the title to Time and Being because it 
really does challenge the notion of being that might change the way we 
want to be on time for school. 
Question: I wanted to ask you about a phrase that came up while this 
was being discussed, and the phrase is being on someone else's time. I'm 
not sure how its possible to be on someone else's time and not to be exist- 
ing on your own time. But I wonder how this is possible? 
Ron: Can you explore this idea a little more? Why does this phrase ht you? 
Question: Well, it strikes me as being impossible-while you exist on 
your own time, say the framework of your day-there's no question in my 
mind that I'm experiencing this day on my time. I recognise that the 
phrase comes up repeatedly that you are meeting deadlines on someone 
else's schedule, or I have to sit through this because I'm not on my own 
76 Rub nose 123 
time, but is there a way to remove ourselves from this situation to reposi- 
tion ourselves? 
Ron: I think that one of the ways to get to this might be that the funda- 
mentally subjective space that I (not we) inhabit is a mixture of presence 
and present, daydream and anticipation, past reflection and future, and 
the term 'time' and the discursive use that I make of it becomes far more 
specific and becomes a good set of relations, which is why sometimes time 
seems to be passing quickly and at other times it seems to go on and on 
and on. Somehow we want to try and locate meaning on a personal level 
of that interiority that can actually allow for a richer exposition of how 
often somebody else is demanding of me a temporal relationship that is 
not my own. It's not that they're forcing me but they're demanding that I 
fit into a predetermined, if not linear, relationship when I'm actually in 
this multiplicity, inhabiting levels of positions inside my body and outside 
my body, struggling with what it means to be situated at all. I think that 
can be a tremendous stress in an institution. The demand is being made 
absolutely, so that if you're not on their time you could be punished- 
you'd be suspended, you are treated as though you have done something 
terrible-simply because you were daydreaming and forgot time. There is 
an issue there about the structure that institutions developed and how 
they impose themselves on that fluidity. The other issue is an issue of find- 
ing the discourse, of finding a measure for what it means to be very young 
or very old. That is how do they define themselves, how does the experi- 
ence of time is unfold for them, and clearly school is not a place or a 
space-let alone time-in which much thought is given over to that. 
That's seen as being too subjective and therefore not suitable. There isn't 
a place for it. That's where I see art  coming in. When you go into art 
classes across Canada, in particular in grades 1, 2 and 3,. . . (I have revis- 
ited elementary school classes a great many times) there's a tremendous 
amount of energy there. It's rich, it's engaged, it's pretty atemporal. But 
there's a sense of that loss of the controlling features of the conventional 
narrative. Its fascinating to me that so much is being taken in and taken 
on by those students. There actually giving so much in that moment, and 
suddenly bang! The bell rings and they're back into a penal like (actually, 
that's a bit of a stretch for me) rhythm. So I guess what I'm trying to say 
is that the terminology we use to describe that relationship has to be care- 
fully thought out, where its the resistance that's really the key and not the 
acceptance. And that's where the utopian comes back. I would prefer to 
be utopian about the extent to which students exist in that space where 
that resistance gathers its strength, even sometimes hurting themselves 
and others seriously in that space. Ultimately we are not rhythms in a 
(read) 77 
process. If it were political at that level, this would be highly depoliticized 
and neutralised. And it remains a site of resistance. 
Question: I wanted to pick up on Chloe's idea of resistance and that 
resistance is everywhere-not only in the classroom. But I have another 
comment. When you Uohanne Sloan] were talking about landscape paint- 
ing, for example, when you are discussing the stillness of that sort atem- 
poral space in relation to new media-for example the way MTV evolved 
-I was thinking about the way that digital media operates to speed things 
up, and the contrast of the speed of that in relation to my own experi- 
ences of it. For me it does have this atemporal quality you describe in 
landscape painting, that sensation of stillness. I would put this question 
to  everybody: is it too early to tell yet about whether or not the new 
media will affect our sense of time? Does it speed things up? Can we 
really say that? 
Ron: I'm trying to relate my experience of hangliding because it was ter- 
rifying. In some sense I think you are right-time did slow down quite a 
bit, although my anxiety increased it. But I think your question is a very 
interesting one. I believe that our culture is at the embryonic stage-the 
baby stage hasn't even been born yet. There's a sense that we've been in 
this stage for a long time (in terms of technology), but I think we are just 
beginning to understand the implications. I'm not entirely sure what is 
happening to the body and our sense of time. I don't necessarily agree 
with Donna Haraway's jump to cyborg spaces-she jumped very quickly 
there. It may be unaswerable at this point. 
Warren: I read about an interesting intervention that occurred in a com- 
petition between Seiko and Swatch watch companies, where Swatch came 
out with a set of advertising that had to do with the new digital technol- 
ogy and the digitization of time. Swatch turned that on its head and came 
out with a watch that kept the hands, but they took the numbers right off 
it. In this way, you could enter a new kind of relationship with time, and 
they would also customise the watches in different shapes and colours. So 
it suggests to me that-going along with the idea that more new medias 
and digital technologies create new narratives of time-there are always 
ways to invert that, whether its in the modification of a watch, or in other 
dimensions of everyday life. I tend to like the kind of new media and art 
that tries to play with time through the emergence of repetition and loop- 
ing, so that we continue to slow down time through things that move and 
transform very slowly or very rapidly. An example of this is Douglas Gor- 
don's Twenty-Four Hours, which was twenty-four hours of watching 
78 Look up center 123456789 l0 
Hitchcock's Psycho. I mean to me, that's a very interesting way of think- 
ing about time. The work of Stan Douglas, which I like very much, con- 
stantly turns to history and utopia by actually slowing it down through 
various kinds of looping effects. In terms of utopia, we are still in that 
place where despite the fact that time is being messed with and will con- 
tinue to be messed with, there will continue to be ways that technology 
allows us to work with time in different ways, ways that encourage the 
imagination, that allow people to see things differently. 
Turn page 79 


English

The Meaning of Flux: Discussion

Marchessault, Janine

Afterword 
Being on Time was an interactive exhibition that set out to explore a set 
of relationships and boundaries: the high school and the city, art and edu- 
cation, age and adolescence, high and low technology. Varying in format 
from photocopy to performance to blackboard to screensaver, the works 
shared in a joint inquiry into the operation of time in school, charting in 
its course the high school experience of future time or no time or as 
McLuhan put it, 'doing time.' Being on Time harkens back to the peda- 
gogical experiments of the sixties where the curriculum and architecture 
were reconfigured to represent a more open and connected space promot- 
ing communication, discovery, being. This was the space encouraged by 
McLuhan's work to Understand Media in the context of the new percep- 
tual needs of the citizen born through the electric galaxy, the 'TV child'. 
Public Access's exhibitions have in the past explored commercial spaces 
whose grammar is institutionalized, in order to protest and subvert but 
further to reimagine these sites in modes which celebrate public culture. 
Central to the conception of this project was a preoccupation with the 
rapid commercialization of core social practices-the effects of which are 
acutely evidenced in the case of public education. Education has, as 
McLuhan predicted, become increasingly consumer-oriented and instru- 
mentalized. And, as Henry Giroux has noted "[clonsiderations of 'cost' 
and 'productivity' have never pressed more closely upon academics than 
now, when such considerations are escorted by the philosophy that busi- 
ness is itself all about knowledge." 
Given the visible encroachment of these calculations in the practice of 
the Ontario curriculum, a large part of our task was to 'make time' for 
this project within the school. To allow the exhibition to live in the space 
necessitated the mediation of school hours, permits and rules. Further, it 
required the commitment of artists (on their own tight schedules) to meet 
with students in many cases doubly burdened with both the obligations of 
part-time employment and their curricular responsibilities. Making time 
for art in the school meant traversing fixed schedules and transforming 
the routine of school and everyday life. 
All of the artists involved in the Being on Time exhibition re-deployed 
found spaces in the school and reconfigured these to set up situations in 
which the materiality of the pedagogical environment becomes an experi- 
ence of structured time. James Car1 worked with a group of students to 
document interstitial spaces found within the faqades of houses in the 
school's vicinity, carefully revealing the sedimented history of place and 
the transformations of class and ethnicity that can be read across these 
axes. Ho Tam's installation of black boards in the school's hallway in a 
manner reversed this exercise by inviting students to inscribe their own 
traces on the walls. Existing inscriptions of homophobic graffitti proved 
to be the starting point for John Greyson's installation which also col- 
lected footage of a life-drawing class taking place within the school. Lisa 
Steele and Kim Tomczak recorded the dreams, fears and nightmares of 
students and housed these audio recordings in a row of anonymous lock- 
ers. Kelly Mark performed the same set of gestures outside the school on 
a precise daily schedule of imperceptible rituals, postitioning her body as 
a fixed time marker in order to  trace movement around her. Michael 
Snow designed a waiting room which asks visitors to wait for their num- 
ber to appear, setting up a systematic structure of duration that, depend- 
ing on the number drawn, could either whisk the visitor away or involve 
him or her in a test of endurance. Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan set 
up fantastical mirrors which distort the very moment of apprehension and 
self image. Finally, Mike MacDonaldYs butterfly quilt made up of speci- 
mens collected from around North America speaks to a sense of fragility 
and temporality, the relation between being and the specificity of place. 
Fundamentally each of the pieces, performances, installations, pho- 
tographs, audio recordings, blackboards, involved setting up relationships 
of dialogue and experiment around the temporal, cultural and political 
economy of the high school as place in history, a psychic formation, a 
material ontology, an experience of duration or waiting, a place that is 
written, performed, imagined and drawn. 
Central Technical School's Art Centre, one of the first institutions of its 
kind in Canada, was designed in 1967 to celebrate art and education at a 
time in Canada's history (the Canadian centenary) when the liberal 
agenda sought to foreground culture and art as central features of a new 
social charter. Situated in the heart of Toronto, the school has increas- 
ingly fallen into disarray due to financial difficulties brought on by con- 
servative governments bent on privatizing education and making 'art' into 
financially viable spectacles. What was once the social and aesthetic 
architecture for future engineers, designers and artists in the city has been 
steadily crumbling in the face of Toronto's bid for status in the global 
economy. It is our hope that the exhibition both drew attention to the 
school's plight in the face of a new conservative curriculum and also suc- 
ceeded in dislodging time from its schedules and deadlines, opening up 
questions around the embedded, subjective and creative nature of time as 
aesthetic and cognitive experience. 
-Janine Marchessault and Sarah Robayo Sheridan 
Walk towards left 137 


Afterword

Wollen, Peter

Knight's Moves

Kibbins, Gary

Lord, Susan

Experimentalism 
Experimentalism is a rather slippery object-certainly not a movement or an easily 
identifiable condition-and is a sufficiently unstable and general concept so as to gen- 
erate a range of positions and debates about the contemporary relationship between 
art and politics. Why experiment? This is certainly not a new question-each genera- 
tion of artists in the last century has asked some version of it, inheriting the critical 
impulse of the avant-garde to reinvent the role of art in society. But, today, with the 
global markets and fragmented politics, the question seems groundless. Is this because 
experimentalism is nomadic or is it quite at home in institutions? Is experimentalism 
merely a style or is it a practice? What does "experimental practice" mean today? 
How do artists and theorists from different generations and social positions think 
about experimentalism? What are the links between experimental practice and partic- 
ular social and political projects, such as those related to identity politics, labour or 
censorship? These questions formed the basis of the Public Access conference "Blow- 
ing the Trumpet to the Tulips: An Exchange on Experimental Media," and the pro- 
ceedings of that conference form the basis of this issue of Public. While we would 
have wished for all the presentations and discussions that evolved from them to be 
reproduced here, the difficulties of rendering the dynamics of "live" presentations into 
a printed journal proved to be insurmountable in some cases. Equally inexpressible in 
print is the affective context. 
The conference was held only six weeks after the attacks of September 11, to which 
many of the presentations, not surprisingly, made direct or indirect reference. The 
issue of historical relevance for experimentalism, at that time measured largely against 
the backdrop of globalization, has been given a more sustained and questioning point 
of focus in some of the articles printed here. 
Yet that was not the only source of distress. Colin Campbell, a video artist from 
Toronto well known personally to many of the conference participants, was at the 
time gravely ill. He was to pass away on October 31. It is not enough to say of Colin's 
work that it was 'admired,' although that is certainly true. Colin was one of those rare 
artists about whom it can be said that he made tangible contributions to artistic and 
social thought. While he always supported artists and worked tirelessly on their 
behalf, he also had strong and very informed opinions about which forms of experi- 
mentalism he felt he could support, and which he couldn't. There were certainly many 
at the conference who felt his critical presence. 
His thoughtful and discriminating character was as much in evidence in his dinner 
table settings as it was in his ideas about art and politics. This made his artistic contri- 
butions so compelling to a community that also cared about the social conditions of 
artmaking. As everyone who knew him would agree, he was, in addition to everything 
else, just a very lovely man. We would like to dedicate this issue to his memory. 
For Colin Campbell 1942-2001. 
-Gary Kibbins and Susan Lord 


Experimentalism

Bear Assumptions: Notes on Experimentalism

Radul, Judy

Just Try It

Contributors 
Deborah Britzman is Professor of Education and 
Graduate Director for the Social and Political Thought 
Program at York University. She is author of Practice 
Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach 
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1991); Lost Subjects, Contested 
Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquir), of Learning 
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) and the forthcoming book, 
After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and 
Psychoanalytic Histories of learning. 
Chloi Brushwood Rose is a doctoral candidate in 
Language, Culture, and Teaching at York University. As a 
writer and photographer, her interests include the com- 
plex relationships between technology, culture, and sub- 
jectivity, as well as the impact of new media on the status 
of knowledge. 
Ron Burnett is President of Ernily Carr Institute of Art 
and Design. He is the author of Cultures of Vision: 
Images, Media and the Imaginary and of the forthcoming 
How Images Think. Articles available on-line at 
http://www.eciad.bc.ca/-rburnett/essays.html 
James Car1 is a visual artist who has a MFA from 
Rutgers, a degree in East Asian Studies and two diplomas 
from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. He lives 
in Toronto and teaches Fine Arts at Guelph University. 
He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 
Toronto Arts Awards, protege Award (1996). 
Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor of Education and 
Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Education at York 
University. His recent research and writing has focused on 
cultural theory in education and artistic practice in rela- 
tion to learning and the pedagogical context. He co-edit- 
ed Race, Identity and Representation in Education and 
has recently contributed a chapter on popular culture and 
music in the films of Isaac Julien in the anthology, Sound 
Identities (New York, Peter Lang, 2000). 
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen and Media Studies at  
the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has pub- 
lished widely on contemporary arts, media and culture. 
His most recent books are Digital Aesthetics (Sage, 1998) 
and Simulation and Social Theory (Sage, 2001). 
Shawna Dempsey & Lom Millan are internationally rec- 
ognized for their smart and funny, feminist performances, 
films, videos, publications and public art projects. This 
duo is infamous for pieces such as We're Talking Vulva, 
A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke, and Lesbian National 
Parks and Services. Shawna and Lorri have been collabo- 
rating full-time since 1989. 
Caitlin Fisher is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies 
in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University. A theorist, 
creative writer and web artist with broad interdisciplinary 
interests Caitlin's research and teaching focus on the 
social and cultural aspects of communication technolo- 
gies, hypermedia, feminist theory and digital multimedia 
work. She is also a founding editor of 1-spot:]ournal of 
Social and Political Thought. 
John Greyson is a prolific video artist, filmmaker and 
writer whose work has been screened in numerous inter- 
national festivals. His 1993 film, Zero Patience, received 
Honourable Mention at the Toronto International Film 
Festival. His works also include Lilies (1996), Uncut 
(1997) and Herr produced at Banff for BRAVO. 
Mike MacDonald is a Canadian of Micmac ancestry. His 
works in video documentary and installation dealing with 
Native and Environmental issues include Nishga Survival 
(1981), What Price An Island? (1984), Seven Sisters 
(1989) and Rat Art (1990). In 1994, he was presented 
with the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award, 
for outstanding contribution to the arts in British 
Columbia. 
Janine Marchessault is Associate Professor and Director 
of the Graduate Programme in Film at York University. 
Her writings on film and culture have beeen published 
widely, and she is the co-editor of numerous anthologies 
including most recently, Wild Science (Routledge, 2000). 
Kelly Mark lives and works in Toronto. Her recent exhi- 
bitions include Present Tense: KeNy Mark at  the AGO. 
Mark's work has often been described as obsessive. 
Processes including repetition, seriality, the grid and sys- 
tematic or administrative working procedures drawn from 
Minimalism and Conceptualism provide a starting point 
for her work. 
Michel Pastoureau is a historian and Director of Studies 
at the Ecole practique des hautes etudes, Paris, and at the 
Ecole des hautes Ctudes en sciences sociales, Paris. He is 
the author of several books including Blue: The History 
of a Color (Princeton University Press, 2001). 
Marc Piccinato is a Toronto-based art maker. He was the 
exhibition co-ordinator for the Being On Time exhibition 
and is a member of the Public Access Collective. 
Sarah Robayo Sheridan is a designer who lives in 
Toronto. In March 2002, she curated a selection of new 
Canadian video art which screened in Cairo, Egypt. 
Michael Snow was born in 1929 in Toronto. He studied 
at the Ontario College of Art and had his first solo exhi- 
bition in 1957. Since then his work has appeared at exhi- 
bitions in every major art centre in Europe and North 
America, His work as a visual artist has earned him 
numerous honours, including the Order of Canada. 
Michael Snow is currently living and working in Toronto. 
Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak have worked in collaboration 
since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and 
photoltext works. In 1993, they received the Bell Canada 
Award as well as a Toronto Arts Award. In 1996, their 
work The Blood Records, written and annotated, received 
a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New 
York. 
Ho Tarn was born in Hong Kong and educated in 
Toronto, Canada. He worked in advertising firms and 
psychiatric facilities before turning to art. He works in a 
diverse mix of disciplines including painting, video? print 
and public art and has exhibited internationally. HIS 
videos include: 99 Men, , dos cartasl two letters, Matinee 
Idol, Pocahontas, The Yellow Pages, Washington Heights 
Untitled. 


Contributors

Stahl, Geoff

Tracing out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montréal

Thomas, Chantal

Blancmange with Almond Milk
Chantal Thomas
Alphabet
I had great difficulty with numbers, and I didn't do much better with
letters. Those alembicated marks, which it didn't suffice to contemplate
or even to spell out one by one, but which still needed to be tied together
in order to end up signifying something, displeased me. Was it their gre-
garious side that I found antipathetic, that need to couple in order to
form a superior unity (like in the Platonic theory of love, which, founded
on incompleteness, never gave me cause to dwell there)? Or rather their
school-bookish character? For it was in school that these two scourges
fell upon me: the need to read and to count. At least I had the true fore-
boding that I was at the point of being caught in an infinite mesh of
gears, and that if I gave in to one letter that would be it for the rest of my
life... Letters represented for me an obscure, insistent menace; that is why
the alphabet soup that my mother regularly served for winter dinners
caused me intense sadness. I leaned over my plate and considered that
round whitish puddle crawling with letters. Some letters were more recog-
nizable than others, but that changed nothing of the global impression
of chaos emitted by this soup-a soft and tasteless chaos. It was served
burning hot, but I waited so long to decide to swallow that it was hardly
warm when I finally slid in my spoon.
But who could have had such an idea, I asked myself while swallowing
a spoonful (once begun, I had only one concern: to finish as quickly as
possible) of c, d, u, w, h, n, v, a, p... ? A letter soup? Made of those
ridiculous, inconsistent elements, ones that tormented with incredible
ease? And what if they suddenly formed words within my body? Develop-
ing their incomprehensible messages inside me? It was worse than the ter-
ror that seized me when, having swallowed a seed, I imagined a lemon
tree or an orange tree beginning to grow inside me. But it was too late to
spit everything out. Besides, the context didn't lend itself to such anact.
Blancmange with almond milk on a strauberry coulis
Going to restaurants was not one of my family's habits. -We went to a
restaurant only while travelling or for an important celebration. It was,
consequently, an event that put me in a state of mad curiosity. How?
There were families other than mine who didn't behave in a very different
manner than my own, but when I went to eat at the home of a friend, it
110
was the differences that affected me and filled me with a strong impres-
sion of exoticism. At my house the food (like the alphabet soup in all
its glory) was put in front of you and it was out of the question ,o .*pr.r,
a wish for anything else. Elsewhere, one asked what you would like. I
understood that I could not choose anything whatsoever, but there were
alternatives nevertheless, That is how one day, in a Bordeaux restaurant, I
found myself stupefied by the variety and the bizarreness of the desserts
on the menu. It was a baroque confusion. Everything was mysterious to
me on the list that was read out, except the ice-cream dessert that bore
the name blancmange with alrnond milk on a stracuberry coulis. Far from
being troubled, I chose it without hesitation. It arrived in the form of a
beautiful ring of opal, freshly turned out of the mold, and set on a deep
red sauce. A coral isle set in a sunset. I feared spreading the sauce on the
almond jelly. I waited a long time before I dared rouch it, first with my
tongue' then with my teeth. Its milky, silky smoothness and melting con-
tact thrilled me, while the coral isle became a phantom isre, preciously
conserved by my memory.
C awliflow er u ith Vinai gr ett e
I prefer them raw, doubtlessly because that was how they were most often
served at lunch by my maternal grandparenrs. The oir rendered them brir-
liant (like warer the nacre of seashells). It pleased me that they were raw,
that there were so few differences between the round, fresh, voluminous
cauliflowers-sorts of blind, angelic heads-displayed at the market and
the one, thinly sliced and lightly ivory, set in the porcelain of my plate. It
was a spring-like surface, which appeared to me to entirely evoke the
energy of beginnings. The term, entr6e, first-course, in its most open form
-where the wish of Bon app1tit resonared like a foretaste of good omen
and in the simplicity of shared familiarity 
-was identified by m., pa,
excellence, with cauliflower and vinaigrette. For in the cauliflower it was
not the caul that one are, but the flower. pink radishes and black radishes
also pleased me, and they too constituted preferred entr6es of my grand-
parents. But they held the risk of bitterness, and thus disappointment.
This danger existed for pink radishes. They were more common than black
radishes, which fascinated me even more because of the surprise of ex-
treme whiteness caused by the transversal cut. I often asked for black
radishes because of this contrast between the so very black envelope and
the so very white, so very secret, flesh. It wasn't serious when there unex-
pectedly came rhe displeasure of a too bitter taste or a slightly cotrony
flesh, one without hardness (another fault of the radish), for I still had
before my eyes the beauty of those rings of snow circled with ebony. But,
let's admit it, as much as the raw cauliflower with vinaigrette that I ate at
11.1
lunchtime, during the recreation break between morning and afternoon
classes, thrilled me, that's how much cooked cauliflower depressed me.
They were not served with vinaigrette (insolent, acidic, malicious, spry),
but with mayonnaise (fatty, yellow, capricious; the mayonnaise either
thickens or it doesn't, and in the latter case, bad humour reigned in the
kitchen and readily overflowed into the other rooms). With cooked cauli-
flower the nacre disappeared. The cooking not only softened it, but also
took away its glow. The freshness of spring disappeared. The vegetable
stagnated in a white-gray November morning. And when I bit into it, the
joy was not there; the caul swept away the flower.
In my family (and I will never know why) cooked cauliflower served
with mayonnaise was a holiday dish. Like canned crab, which astounded
me because of the Russian name on the tin and because of the abyss which
my imagination never managed to bridge between this pale, compact con-
densation veined with red, and the dull green crustacean that lived its life
at the bottom of the ocean, and which occasionally came to pinch one of
my toes when I went out to swim.
Tbe Froth of the'Waues
"Stop playing with the foam," shouted Sonia's grandmother, tired of see-
ing us endlessly return to her, our faces covered with froth, all in tears
because of the salt that burned our eyes. rWe looked as if we had just
escaped, right in the middle of a shave, from a demon barber. Ve weren't
sorry. All we wanted was that she get rid of all the foam, sometimes
mixed with fine strands of seaweed, that clogged our noses, mouths, and
eyes. Her grandmother sighed, left her knitting, took out a towel, and
wiped us with a brusqueness that made us laugh. Once cleaned off, we
tan again along the seashore. And the game recommenced. \7e walked the
length of the beach in the frothy water, scooping up that weightless white-
ness, chatting innocently, then suddenly one of us would dump it all on
the other's head. The announcement of a furious combat. The first one to
cry "uncle!" was the loser. She had swallowed too much water, and she
could neither breath nor see. She had bitten the froth of the waves.
Lernon Sorbet
After dinner, in summer, we didn't go out just to go out. \7e went out to
have sorbet. That was the formula and ritual iustification. The ice-cream
shop was at the corner-a rounded corner-between the Boulevard de la
Plage and the Rue du Casino. I chose lemon and Sonia chose raspbelry or
strawberuy (she wasn't bothered by the little seeds, which really annoyed
me). To the question, "\7ith or without whipped cream?," we shouted,
"Yes," jumping for joy under the counter and reaching out for the cones,
1.12
while our parents rustled their purses. 'We savoured our pleasure in ad-
vance. "V/e're going to lick the froth of the waves," said Sonia. Older
boys and girls slowly strolled in pairs on the boulevard. Some of them
walked in the shadows on rhe beach. They also could have eaten ice-
cream, but we guessed that they hadn't gone out for that.
Intuition altered nothing of the perfection of the moment, the miracle
of the coldness in the mouth, on the lips, with the sea wind and its smell
of iodine that blended so well at that point with rhe lemon, with that sen-
sation as pointed as it was rapid. The sorbet didn't last. And that tran-
sience formed part of my pleasure. It was the exact antithesis of cotton
candy. I detested cotton candy. That pastel cloud that stuck to your face
occupied too much space, lasted too long and ended up dissolving into
pure sugar in your mouth. A stupid cloud that appeared every autumn at
the country fair. There we also ate bright red apples dipped in caramelized
sugar. Their glow stopped you right in your tracks, but they were berter
to look at than to eat. The fruit inside was dead, tasteless. And when dur-
ing catechism I heard the story of Eve for the first time, that horrendous
disaster of being exiled (she, Adam, and their entire progeny, us included)
for having bitten into an apple, I dreamed: let's hope at leasr that the fruit
had some taste, that it wasn't one of those spongy things in a crunchy
envelope, that mummified fruit stuck on a stick, offered to us by the mer-
chants of the country fair. But perhaps the same apple was indeed at the
origin of that misfortune. .. Ife then made a thousand detours to avoid
the merchants of temptation. As the fair was not big, we ceaselessly found
ourselves before their cart; and they brandished their overly red apples
with a laughter that frightened us.
The Host
"Open your mouth wide," said the priest."stick out your tongue, and the
instant you receive the Sacred Host pay uery strict attention so that It
doesn't touch your teeth. Listen carefully: your teeth must not even so
much as graze the body of Our Father." Marlene, who had a large set of
braces on her teeth, was terrified, and I, even without this handicap, was
filled with anxiety. Each Sunday I prepared to take communion with the
idea that something dreadful was going to happen. "Imagine," I told
Sonia, "that I bite into a Son of God and that he begins to bleed in my
mouth, like he bled on the cross."
"The Son of God." she corrected me.
"\Thether or not he is an only child makes no difference at all concern-
ing the blandness of the thing."
"-Who knows. But it's true. It is bland."
"It's so that nobody refuses communion under the pretext that he
113
doesn't like the taste. Or inverselS to avoid gluttons who sneak back in
line several times to have their fill."
"I like that blandness. The manner in which the host gets soft and dis-
solves, without one's encountering any substance at all,"
"Shut up. You disgust me,"
Sonia was fanatical about that white glue that tasted like almonds, with
which she stuffed herself. She also delighted in Nestl6's milk, but espe-
cially because of the tube. As for me, I didn't like any of that. On the
other hand, I loved to leave communion, hands joined, eyes lowered, all
my senses keen to feel the insipid and divine pellicle vanish against my
tongue. There existed a perfect moment, when I turned my back to the
altar and begin to walk down the central aisle, just as I imagined the host
still intact, a minuscule moon at the opening of my throat, gently bringing
light to the depths of my body.
Milk
Vas it good, or wasn't it good? I never quite decided. But I adored look-
ing at it in a bottle or a glass. The sight of milk rendered me silenr, puting
me in a particularly peaceful and contemplative state, as do the waters of
a lake for certain people. I examined that white opaqueness, that screen
of innocence. It seemed that there was something to discover on the other
side. Sometimes I was sent to the grocery to buy a bottle of milk. It was a
task that I took very seriously. I loved to bring that precious liquid home.
One summer, when we were in the Charente, I became friends with a
young girl who kept cows. She was called Louisette. I sat in the fields
alongside her under the big umbrella thar protected her from the rain and
the sun. She opened her songbook and spent hours mouthing the words
as she read. I begged her: "Sing so that I can hear something." She shook
her head and continued to murmur the words of popular tunes. A cow
mooed to underline the silence of this mute concert. "Idiot," I said to the
cow. Louisette was too dear to me for me to get annoyed with her. One
evening, perhaps to console me for all those unsung songs, the young girl
let me go with her to the stable to witness the operation of milking the
cows. She sat on a small wooden stool and, mute like an automaton, with
an absent look, began to pull on the udder with a regular movement. Did
the cow like to be milked or not? Her face, which I saw from below and a
bit in profile, was without expression, like that of Louisette. Her huge
eyes with long lashes reflected rhe most perfect indifference. I asked
myself whether she felt concerned about it all. No, it was rather that the
cow was the pretext for a phenomenon that did not concern it. Louisette
asked if I wanted to try. I attempted a trembling gesture and quickly
returned to being a spectator. Louisette made fun of me and filled a pail
114
with hot and frothy liquid. I carried it to the house, careful not to trip
on a pebble or a clump of grass. I walked with eyes lowered, and when I
knocked a knee against the milk pail it made the sound of a bell. I was
conscious of having witnessed something marvellous. But that still didn't
help me decide whether I liked milk or not.
I had to await a winter voyage to London, during my student years, ro
understand that I liked it. I had bought a small carton, which I opened
outside, on the sidewalk, and drank it with a straw. It had the same effect
of coldness and surprise as a lemon sorbet. I found it delicious, but per-
haps it was necessary to have asked for it in English to find it so. Such
was the magic key that revealed to me that milk was eood.
Sqwid
Sonia and I lived in Arcachon. 1we spent all our vacations on the beach.
\Tithout being blas6, far from ir, we took some breaks from the frantic
rhythms of our quests. nfe then spread out our towels and lay down. Ve
played at taking sunbaths. I7e imitated the grownups. k was great bore-
dom. Corinne couldn't permit herself that luxury. As she only spent one
month of the summer at Arcachon, she didn't want to lose a minute, and
never stopped exploring. She observed the smallest hole in the sand, the
smallest shell. She was forever with her nose glued to algae. Once, very
excited, she showed us something white and light, a sort of thin strip cut
in a strange manner.
"Ife know what it is," we said. "It's the bone of a squid. rWe make
boats out of them, and the birds stick their beaks into them.', ,,A squid
bone!" mused Corinne. "Squid is really good. At home, my mother cooks
it in its ink, and it's tender and delicious."
"In its ink," guffawed Sonia. "Your mother cooks it in its ink? Does
she also serve stuffed notebooks, fried erasers, and glue sauces?" Sonia
took on her mocking tone, but I knew, remembering her passion for white
glue, that she wasn't totally scoffing.
Yoghurt of Grated Stone
My mother, for whom the kitchen was always the site of her most awful
anger (she sometimes hurled pots and pans against the opposite wall, the
wall of Sonia's house), had for some time been equipped with a bjzane
round thing that was supposed to make yoghurt. It was clear that she
controlled it poorly. Since the arrival of this machine, the only thing I
ever got for dessert was liquidy and granulous yoghurt. I would ingur-
gitate it in one big mouthful and then quickly leave to play outside, where
Sonia, Michel, and Fr6d6ric, the neighbours from the house facing ours,
awaited me,
115
A white and tender stone was needed. \7e scraped it against the con-
crete floor of the courtyard. Ifhen we had a sufficient quantity of scrap-
ings, we gathered it together in a small heap and spooned it into a yoghurt
container. \7e added water and stirred. .We drew lots to see who would
taste it. The chosen one fled at top speed. The pursuit could last a long
time, but in the end the victim was always caught and condemned to sub-
mission. Vanquished as he or she may be, the victim, mouth tightly closed,
seemed resolved not to submit to the vile brew. And too bad if we spilt
the yoghurt all over the victim's face, hoping that this would force the
mouth open. I7hich is precisely what would happen, such that a few drops
of ground stone yoghurt were swallowed. The unlucky one trembled with
disgust and always found the force to be liberated from the tormentors.
Then it was their turn to flee and to run with all their might. But some-
times it happened that one of them slipped on the puddle of yoghurt and
fell down. \fhat followed was atrocious.
Translated by Allen S. \X/eiss. [An earlier version of this essay appeared inTaste, Nostalgia,
ed. Allen S. Weiss (New York: Lusitania Press, 1997.)l
1,1,6


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The Meaning of Flux: Discussion

Afterword

Knight's Moves

Experimentalism

Bear Assumptions: Notes on Experimentalism

Just Try It

Contributors

Tracing out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montréal

Contributors

Blancmange with Almond Milk

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