Imagine walking down the street in a desolate urban neighborhood—it could be in Toronto, or Montreal, or even Brooklyn—with its shabby storefronts and drab concrete high-rise apartment buildings, its peeling billboards and pot-holed streets. Then a pair of beat cops, blue uniforms neatly pressed and creased, revolvers snapped into their shiny leather holsters, suddenly clasp and erupt into a fierce and silent tango. The tango is nothing if not passionate, intimate, and proudly defiant, and it is easy to imagine these two ordinary cops wholly engrossed, dancing cheek-to-cheek, parading up and down the littered sidewalk. And if we were to witness this episode in passing, out of the corners of our eyes, we would, I think, at first be baffled and astonished, but soon we would burst out laughing and feel, for a moment at least, liberated: here the mundane yet stifling progress of habit, and hierarchy, and power (after all, police officers are representatives of state violence) spontaneously dissolved in favor of an irrepressibly poetic emergency of passion.
Situationist dandies like Guy Debord, and Fluxus bohemians like George Maciunas, instinctively grasped the need for artists to intervene in the increasingly over-determined urban spaces of post-war Europe and America, in what Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre identified as the ideological structure of everyday life: both the Situationists and the Fluxus artists wished to use the detritus and spaces of ordinary life in order to undermine repressive societal norms. Yet whereas the actions of these artists often feel in retrospect like self-conscious pranks, the politics they embody wildly romantic, works like Diane Borsato’s Police (2006), a poster of a pair of police officers doing the tango on an urban side walk that is part of her SAW Gallery exhibit in Ottawa, has great humanity, and tenderness, and abandon, as well as great vulnerability, as though the seamless veil of ideology in which we all live had suddenly been torn open, not by underground radicals, but more simply by the impulsive fever of desire and affection.
Typically documented by elegantly composed photographs, Diane Borsato’s interventions transfigure the public and institutional into fluid spaces of affective exchange that are deeply private and seem to exist suspended outside the usual web of purpose and authority. In Mannequin Impossible (2006), for instance, Borsato borrowed an old mannequin from the Royal Military College Museum in Kingston and took it on a date to the graduation ceremony at the Royal Military College, attended parades with it, and even escorted it to the prom. In a way closely related to Police, in Mannequin Impossible Borsato confronted the traditions of institutional violence, the legitimized violence that has always been a prerogative of the state, not with ideological slogans or the kinds of conceptual critiques that have been common and less and less potent since the 1970s, but with something far more unexpected—a rush of innocent affection. For Moving the Weeds Around (2005), Borsato employed twenty-five volunteers in Halifax to dig up weeds from cracks in the pavement, abandoned lots, and neglected lawns, and replant them elsewhere in the city. In urban spaces that today are often meticulously groomed, with their manicured lawns and even flower beds and pruned trees, weeds are random squatters of unknown provenance, mongrel and unruly and wholly populist—they are inclined to sprout up wherever there is a handful of dirt. While Moving the Weeds Around is clearly a less emotionally immediate work than Police or Mannequin Impossible, it has an exuberant absurdity and is quietly iconoclastic. Weeds are like spontaneous emotions, vaguely inappropriate, bursting forth into full flower in the middle of the night. They are ungovernable forms of life and beauty; perhaps they are what deserve our dogged labor and tender ministrations.
In Museum (2006), also one of the postsers in the SAW exhibit, Borsato insinuated herself into the conservation room of a major Canadian art museum. In the photograph she is found holding an elaborately framed roundel of what looks like a nineteenth century society lady—she has the soft, pale, diffident look of Whistler portraits. Dressed primly in a black dress with a starched white collar, dyed red hair coiled back into a tight bun, Borsato is leaning forward, eyes closed, and licking this society lady on the lips, her tongue unfurling, thick and glistening. Set in an easel beside her is a portrait of a man that might be from the studio of a seventeenth century low country master, his gaze toward the viewer stern and melancholy. Museum is by turns rude and tender and ferociously erotic. And like the earlier Artifacts in my Mouth (2003), for which Borsato was given permission to explore museum objects like a stuffed peacock’s head and an Egyptian statuette with her tongue and lips, it implies a different, more sensuous, and less objectified way of knowing the reified artifacts that fill the glassed in cases of museums. Although at least since Descartes the eyes have been regarded as the translucent portal of knowledge and the soul, the mouth is the wet, exposed, infantile locus of the sensitive embodied self, the place where various hungers converge. And to lick something is to know it, not as a named object whose history has already been narrated for us, but as an indeterminate field of possibilities. Museum does not so much transgress the proprieties of the museum, as wholly and fundamentally ignore their premises.
Museum is aligned with Borsato’s more private works, which also include the early Touching 1,000 People (1999), in which she strolled about Montreal discreetly making contact with strangers on the street, and The Embroidery Bandit (2002), in which she sewed small flowers into the pockets and lining of clothes she tried on in the dressing rooms of boutiques: one imagines that the painting she licked in Museum has also been subtly and indecipherably changed, a fine slick of saliva coating the woman’s face. By contrast, Parliament (2006), the third of the poster works created for the SAW exhibit, pushes Borsato’s more public actions into an exquisitely phantasmal realm. “It took seven long years and over 40 million dollars, but a team of enthusiastic volunteers successfully accomplished their project to rotate the Peace Tower 360 degrees,” runs the text over a photograph of a group of men and women in front of the Parliament in Ottawa, a crane rising up just behind them. We have grown accustomed to the idea of large, vastly expensive projects, like the expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, that are marketed and justified as contributions to the public good—a new building by a name architect, we are told, increases the stature of a city and attracts tourists and their dollars. Borsato suggests that ordinary citizens marshal massive resources in the service of an action that is inspired and poetic and useless. The absurdity of Parliament is also what makes it touching. Perhaps our most authentic and free and human expressions are also ones that serve no purposes beyond themselves.
In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Guy Debord’s less coolly analytical Situationist fellow traveller, Raoul Vaneigem, argued that the revolution is also an interior one, liberating human passions from the repressive strictures of capitalism. Displayed as posters in public spaces, Police, Museum, and Parliament do not exactly share Vaneigem’s soaring free-love May ’68 zeal, but all three of them offer images of moments of possible liberation, archetypes of the rupture of the ordinary, where passion, curiosity, beauty, and exuberance triumph over, or at least interrupt, the dictatorship of the merely useful: police officers twirling off in a mad tango, shy girls suddenly licking paintings, citizens lifting and rotating huge government buildings.
Daniel Baird is the Arts and Literature Editor at The Walrus magazine.