Every few months, the Western Front locates an intellectual thought-rocket on its literary radar, and invites the person to speak in Vancouver.
Called Scrivener’s Monthly, the free, curated evening (a throwback to the early, literary-heavy days of the legendary artist-run centre) typically features presentations by local and international artists and thinkers whose practice extends beyond written and visual expression, into the philosophical space between.
“There was a very intensive period in the ‘70s and early ‘80s where there was a lot of literary activity happening alongside the visual and performing art programs here,” explains exhibitions curator Pablo de Ocampo. “So Scrivener’s is sort of looking back to that history and wanting to bring that idea back into it.”
Presentations range from lectures about art history, to poetry readings, to performative concepts, such as exploring language and the use of language in the arts.
Regarding the latter, Western Front has invited the multi-disciplinary Martine Syms to speak on Jan. 28. The young, LA-based feminist is known for her hybrid use of publishing, video and performance to examine representations of blackness in popular culture. For Scrivener’s, Syms will blend performance and lecture into Misdirected Kiss – her observational presentation on the language, movement and performance of black female entertainers (named after the 1904 film in which a white man accidentally kisses his black maid).
And while history (and her presentation) is rich with further examples, de Ocampo highlights how Syms also dives into what we see today.
“She wrote a great piece, and the performance she’s going to do here kind of comes out of the same trajectory […] talking about the Cosby Show for a little bit, and Scandal, and Nashville. And I really like Scandal and Nashville,” he laughs, “so it just hit in my head, like ‘Oh, here’s someone who’s, like, an art thinker, who’s really into these terribly trashy TV shows that I’m embarrassed to watch.”
We caught up with Syms by phone in LA to learn more about Misdirected Kiss. Her answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
KK: Why is blackness in popular culture a subject you’re academically passionate about? What prompted you to explore it in your own art?
MS: I’ve always been interested in pop culture and movies and musicians in a lot of my work, and so the writing has sort of been around that, specifically performances of race.
And I am sort of a performer myself, so the more I found myself in front of audience and being photographed and stuff, the more I started to think about how people are sort of constantly being photographed – you have this new way of presenting yourself. You know that book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life? It puts everyday interactions in a theatrical setting. Like, how when you encounter somebody, you’re trying to ascertain information about them through what they’re wearing or how they speak. You try to place them in some sort of context? I started to look at how that presentation changes with the proliferation of images and social media. That was the first point.
And then looking at how people are following traditional pop culture models, how they fashion themselves in these Internet personas, made me look back at more mainstream examples of that.
As I was looking at that information, I had already come across Maxine Powell – she was at Motown and since a lot of their talent was coming from the housing projects in Detroit, they wanted a sort of aspirational “brand”. They had an in-house charm school and she was the leader of it. The way she talks about her work was likening it to a kind of civil rights movement, by inviting this idea that politics is something that you do with your body, which is a quote from the artist Gordon Hall.
Gordon originally commissioned this piece, Misdirected Kiss, for the Centre for Experimental Lectures in New York.
When you say Maxine wanted her artists to be ‘aspirational’, do you mean for women in the projects, black women, or all women?
All women, really, because she compared what she was doing to being regal. You know, she wanted the Supremes to look like royalty, and I think part of them being that aspirational was what gave the Supremes but also Motown the ability to cross over.
Tell me more about Misdirected Kiss.
It’s a very multi-media lecture. Basically you see my computer desktop and as I’m talking through different things, I’m pulling images, text, quotes, videos and audio playing simultaneously. It begins with you looking at me through Photobooth, and then I just start piling things on top of the other media.
What moments in pop culture or people do you touch on?
I talk about Queen Latifah, specifically her character from the sitcom Living Single. Tyra Banks is another person. I went to a camp – Tyra Banks had a camp for girls that I attended when I was in middle school – and that was about body image and self-esteem. It was pretty hilarious, it was sort of a precursor to America’s Next Top Model. We did ropes courses in the morning, and then she’d do these sermons in the evening where everybody would end up crying.
A lot of it is also about linking ideas of “otherness” with ideas of insanity, so I talk about the film Laughing Gas, which is from 1907, and it features a black woman moving through the city, laughing hysterically, and kind of upsetting the order of the public with her laughter.
There’s a lot. [Laughs] I have a lot of GIFs and celebrities and references that are all packed into it.
Do you look at how these ideas of body image and movement have changed over the years, or somehow link it all together?
It's more about cultivating, basically that everyone's individual experience, that happens to them, that happens within their bodies, changes the way that they move. So your body becomes a kind of document about your experiences. And certain people have shared cultural experiences, that then inform a kind of movement, which is something I'm interested in exploring. And also, how that changes through time.
So I think what the Supremes or Motown and Maxine Powell were talking about in the '60s, maybe now we have this term, respectability politics, talking about how by acting a certain way, maybe you'll get treated a certain way.
I also talk about Sandra Bland, and I show the footage from her arrest when she was stopped, and I talk about Claudia Rankine, some of the quotes from her book, Citizen, which talks about microagression, or really macroagression. How she started writing that book was she was battling cancer, and she when she was diagnosed she had the suspicion that it was racism that had made her sick. That it had this physical toll.
So what I'm thinking about is the link between the mental toll or weight or presence, and how it manifests physically.
I'm looking at a lot of black women specifically, but not exclusively.
• Martine Syms speaks on Jan. 28 at 7pm at the Western Front (303 East 8th). Free. Syms will also be reading at Fillip on Jan. 30 at 1pm. Contact [email protected] for information and to RSVP.
