In her video Box Concert, Suzy Lake holds a long oblong cardboard box in her hands and moves it back and forth for a static camera within the confines of a nondescript room. Joyce Wieland's Oh Canada (animation) is one in a series of print and embroidered works that depict row upon row of brightly painted lips that mouth each syllable to the National Anthem. Jane Wright's Maneuvers is a video document of three prosaic everyday scenes which the camera simply and indifferently records, passing back and forth from one to the other. Each work points to the ongoing revision of the modernist art object that was a legacy of the conceptualist and minimalist work of the sixties as well as to liberal social policies of the seventies in Canada that encouraged the development of a national identity through culture. The experimental artforms that resulted from new technologies -video, performance, body art, intermedia, installation- went hand in hand with the growth of artist-run centres in Canada, the birth of new magazines on art and expanded funding for new artforms. All of this was integral to the development of a materialist theory of art production that was part of a broader political movement -the beginnings of what now is referred to as identity politics. The women's movement, the gay liberation movement, the black liberation movement and student movements were part of a post '68 disillusionment with traditional and centralized leftist theories of power. Through the exploration of non-traditional artforms, artists developed what was already implicit in American minimalism and conceptualism and what resulted from post '68 political culture: an interest in the particular, concrete, non-totalizing and signifying dimensions of experience.

Video, with its emphasis on immediacy, narrative and its non-object status, became part of new aesthetic language that was essentially opposed to transcendent theories of modernist painting and sculpture. Picking up where the critical self-referential impetus of conceptualist and minimalist painting and sculpture left off, much video art was engaged in an analysis of the signifying elements of video itself that occured in tandem with a redefinition of the political signification of culture. Thus, Lake's Box Concert, while seemingly a benign demonstration of repetitive movement -a mystifying modern dance captured on grainy tape- is really the collusion of the technologies of performance, the body and video. Lake's movements, the simple act of swinging the oblong box back and forth, are mapping out the dimensions of representational space, a space previously confined to flat canvas surface or sculptural form, that is, represented or real space. The conflation of both in Box Concert suggests the inadequacies of previous critical art language as well as the potential for an art engaged in everyday practices.

Cinematic representation is the subject of Jane Wright's Maneuvers. Her video camera recorded three prosaic scenarios in suburban Ontario: a family barbecue, a bus stop and children in a park. Cutting back and forth between each scene, the most striking feature of this tape is not only its raw immediacy and sense of real time, but also a dawning awareness of the stubborn presence of the video camera. Maneuvers' inversion of highly edited and narratively structured Hollywood cinema -where a laboured fabrication and manipulation creates a sense of realness- reveals the very constructedness of representation. Maneuvers is remarkably non-maneuvering; there is a sense that the camera has simply been carted to each scene and turned on. Fast editing and highly structured narratives are meant to conceal the process of the construction of meaning in representation; in Maneuvers Wright's laconic recording of everyday activities pointed to an increased awareness of the thickness of representation that became of increasing concern for artists engaged in political critique.

Joyce Wieland created in the early 70s a series of lithographic and embroidered work entitled Oh Canada (animation). Transposing musical sound to serial imagery, Wieland created a series of lip imprints (embroidered in the wall hangings and pressed onto paper in the lithographs) that mark out the syllables to CanadaÍs national anthem in a nod -with lips- to the competing ideologies of nationalism and feminism. Wieland's serial and popular cultural imagery may seem to owe a debt to Pop Art but also Duchamp's legacy of investigations into the ontological status of art objects to which Oh Canada refers while emending it with feminist critique. Much like Duchamp's With My Tongue in My Cheek, 1959, a plaster cast of his face with his tongue literally in his cheek, Oh Canada makes language and sound concrete as a chain of signifying elements.

All of the works in the exhibition are practical, formal investigations of the materiality of culture that position it as an oppositional language embodied in everyday experience. Relationships between performance, video, text, body art and music were seen to share common ground in that they inverted hierarchies of form and the relationship between art and life. The political dimensions of this strategy were fully realized in the activities of CEAC (the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication) that grew out of the Kensington Arts Association in the mid seventies. CEAC, in its development of inter-related cultural events and political activities, documented through STRIKE Magazine, was able to make the link between the structural concerns of experimental art and a political practice that sought a true alignment between art, everyday life and social space.

Tom Folland

Acknowledgements:
Thanks are extended to Roger Bywater, Dennis Day, John Faichney, Ann-Marie Fleming, John McLachlin, Edie and Morden Yolles without whom the exhibition would not have been possible.

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