2385 Agricola Street features
Wheatley sitting in the window of a vacant storefront on a street in an economically depressed area of Halifax, at night. Naked, legs spread, she points a video camera at passers-by while a collaborator videotapes the scene from the street. An invited audience observes the performance from inside the store. Tapes of the event, featuring footage recorded by Wheatley and her collaborator have been exhibited at various locations across the country.
In Free Dance Lessons Milman and Gratland offer dance lessons to pedestrians at busy intersections in downtown Toronto. Video footage of their efforts can be found on CBCs Zed TV website, and was recently exhibited in Psychotopes at YYZ Artists Outlet in Toronto. Free Dance Lessons is clearly a descendent of Pipers seminal performance Funk Lessons (1982-84). Both works use dance as a way to engage audiences, encourage self-expression and social interaction. In both works the artist takes on the role of dance instructor or facilitator. In contrast to Piper's pedagogical pose (instructing art school audiences in one "move" after another until they have the necessary funk to get down to James Brown), Free Dance Lessons is a street corner free- for-all. Milman, Gratland and videographer(s) set up a boom box at a downtown location and proceed to get down, attempting to entice pedestrians to abandon their cares to the pleasures of dance. "Free Dance Lessons seeks to expose and sabotage the repressive physical and psychological order necessitated by city living," the artists declare. A worthy project if ever there was one, but, like Catalysis IV, Free Dance Lessons enters less utopian territory in the move from live and unpredictable street performance to carefully edited documentation exhibited in a gallery.
The straight, the professional and the dull are all performances too, the artists assert. They try to shimmy people from one performative mode to another. Gallery audiences witness their success, as old ladies and stuffed suits lay down their loads and get down. They also see citizens under siege as camera and dancer follow the unwilling down the street, making an object of display out of a refusal to submit to the "fun" on offer. Every person who turns away, every shot that lingers on an unresponsive stony face is a reassertion of the public's need for artists; for the better, smarter, freer world that we work to build.
To the fleshy provocations of 2385 Agricola Street, an "appropriate" reaction is impossible. Every face caught by Wheatley's camera (the majority of which are male) is grabbing a piece of snatch. Whether leering or blushing, spectators are caught in the double bind of camera/cunt looking out at them through the glass. Every passerby is made a voyeur and displayed as a voyeur, like it or not.
Although she has referred to her performances as "gifts" of herself to her audiences, Wheatley's work operates more as an aggressive intervention in the social mechanics of the gaze than as an attempt to bestow freedom or pleasure on her audiences. If any "gift" is given, it is that of the pleasure that comes with the display of another's naivete: a pleasure that the video documentation of this work offers to gallery visitors, and to the "special guests" watching from the back room.
Curator Cliff Eyland offers a helpful set of designations in his discussion of Wheatley's performances. He identifies the art audience (those inside the store watching the original performance and those in the gallery viewing the documentation at a later date) as the "first audience" and the watchers on the street as the "readymade audience." The first audience is offered a thinly veiled opportunity to define itself in opposition to the failure of the readymade audience to appropriately interpret Wheatley's nude provocations. It is too easy to read each face that looks out of the monitor/into her camera as either a lecherous or humiliated subject. This representation of the public becomes a way to reiterate difference and cultural superiority.