Command Scan- panorama

Welcome to the Panel:
Anda Kubis and I organized this panel because we were interested in bringing together a number of contemporary artists who in different ways are responding to the postmodern media environment through their painting practices.

- Peter Byrne - Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology
- Janet Jones - Director, MFA Programme, York University
- Anda Kubis - Studio Instructor, York University
- Arlene Stamp- Studio Instructor, Alberta College of Art and Design
- Jay Wilson - Painter / Graphic Designer, Toronto

Janet Jones: Artist Presentation
University Art Association Conference: OCAD / 1999

For the last several years I have been investigating, through painting, the visual dynamics of urban space particularly as it relates to the woman as flaneuse but more broadly encompassing issues of control and power traced through the ideals of the Enlightenment Project to the Postmodern city.

For this presentation, entitled p a n o r a m a, I will be showing two groups of paintings the real thing, (5'x7' - 1998) and panorama ( 9"x 5'6" - 1999), all oil on canvas.

In these paintings I have reversed the male-ordained role of 'the flaneur' in my encounters with 'heroic' public and institutional space.

In The Painter of Modern Life (1863) Charles Baudelaire the 19th century poet and art critic used the word flaneur to describe the bourgeoisie male as he regards the new urban scene of Parisian modernity.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - (p.9)

Yet as a woman, even a contemporary woman, I can never remain hidden from the world, for as a woman I am part of that world that is to be seen, part of the spectacle for the passionate spectator, for the flaneur. Traditionally, women were associated with the private space of domesticity , men with the public sphere of urban street life and capitalist exchange. As Griselda Pollock writes in "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity",

"For women, the public space thus construed were where one risked losing one's virtue, dirtying oneself; going out in public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied. For a man going out in public meant loosing oneself in the crowd away from the demands of respectability". (Vision and Difference , 1988 p. 69) .

Within the divisions of this gendered space it was not by accident that Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot painted women together and with children within the confined spaces of the home, the garden and the balcony. It was other than respectable women- the prostitute, the bohemian, the woman of the lower classes who became the subject of the flaneur's gaze and possibly a flaneuse, herself.

I have always loved to roam the streets, alone, in the core of a big city; Montreal, New York, Toronto - preferably around dusk. From the time I was 'let loose' as a young woman it was my sign of freedom, I was unreachable, my coordinates unknown. In the beginning it was a mesmerizing experience, Fifth Avenue at night - the Chrysler Building morphed to become The Radiator Building by Georgia O'keefe, the lights, the darkness, the speed, - I was a true modernist caught up in the spectacle of progress. But, even in my naiveté I realized I was being watched. I was part of a cat and mouse game. At times, I was afraid and resentful but there was also a perverse pleasure in testing the limits of safety, in transgressing the boundaries. I assumed various costumes- who would follow and approach me dressed in a skirt and high heels, who in jeans and a leather jacket? But it was not until Paris, the city of the original flaneur that I learned how to watch back.

Much has recently been written concerning the sexual politics of the gaze which privileges the man who objectifies and masters the woman whom he gazes upon. (Mulvey, Pollock, Clark, Berger) To escape this power dynamic the woman, I, had to also possess the phallus or the power and the camera became the tool of this power. It became the visible sign that I too was watching, I too could capture and possess. But as an 'aura' of truth still surrounds the photograph no matter how much the possibility of 'truth' is put into question and the digital intervenes, I could also record and therefore remember. I had evidence. From then on I was watched but with suspicion or curiosity but little desire.

I approach and photograph the fabric of the contemporary urban 'landscape' with an ecstasy pertinent to its speed/space relation to substance and a caution that knows where the human subject does and does not belong. Panopticon circumstances and situations of surveillance; the posturing of visual 'objects and the monitoring of the gaze are shown up in my work as images I experience in the labyrinths of runways and showcasing that constitute our postmodern urban domain. As a flaneuse I was particularly drawn to public spaces which are traditionally the site of male dominated corporate and institutional power; bank towers, headquarters for multi-national corporations, and the underground passage ways which control the flow of people and link the modules of skyscrapers. I soon came to realize that these spaces, as non-places, both everywhere and nowhere, within what Marc Auge calls supermodernity (Non-Places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Verso 1995) are reminiscent of all the futuristic utopian and distopian images of the city, from its functional perfection in Things to Come to the imagined virtual spaces of corporate headquarters in William Gibson's Chiba City.

These places, began my questioning of what constitutes public space. Although they are open to the public, they are heavily monitored and what is allowable is tightly controlled. What is permissible is what is instrumental to the flow and accumulation of capital - the going to and coming from the office in regulated patterns of movement, eating as fuel for work, speaking as an exchange of information, everything else is excess to be eliminated. In this kind of space photographing is a transgressive act done with the knowledge I am under surveillance; surveying the surveyors, moving faster than the security guards.

Although, in part, I see painting marked as a metaphor for bodily experience, I do not think of paint as a visceral stand in for bodily fluids. Instead, my concerns focus on the relationship of painting as a medium of differance (difference + deferral), in relation to the dominant cultural role occupied by mainstream broadcast media using emerging visual technologies of representation. My concerns include issues of surveillance and visual inscription attached to the use of images by these media, and their affecting of the human subject through visual portrayal of their own corporate ideals and norms. These 'heroic' depictions of the 'new as norm' are the images I engage in my work. Both the subject matter and painting, as the medium is the message, function as 'counter-practice'.

Increasingly we are shutting out the 'real' world - real experience, real sex, real travel; we know ourselves and the 'other' through mediated or simulated experiences on the screen. Arthur Kroker's slogan "bodies in recline / bodies in decline", points to the consequences of our need to go virtual, to leave our bodies behind, to trash the world, to appear only as a telepresence. The group of paintings titled the real thing, question our notions of what is 'real' what is simulated. Can we tell anymore? Do we care?

The medium of painting itself critiques the virtual through the implied touch of the artist's hand and the materiality of the paint and the support. Yet in these paintings, I see the surface as hovering somewhere between the screen and skin, caressed by my touch but with no tracking of the hand / brush visible, suspended, in the air. The colour glows, purposefully fake: video blue, blood red mutated into day-glow pink. Life has turned into still-life, frozen on the screen, reflected in glass, observed, recorded, transmitted, digitized, coded. Seductive in its virtual perfection. Beautiful but dead. In structure, the tall narrow bands to the left reference side bars. The abstract shapes which float across the surface another layer, perhaps a distilled meaning, perhaps an intervention which further disrupts the subject centered, perspectival space of Renaissance painting.

In these paintings, I was specifically addressing the presence of the woman, myself as flaneuse of the postmodern urban environment. I was interested in how these pervasive characteristics of visual accounting tend to implicate women most particularly. The gaze and the object of the gaze; woman viewing/desiring/consuming the commodity landscape - and - woman as viewed/desired/consumed; consumed by visible/invisible avatars of the gaze, in a theatre of contrivance. But in the postmodern city all of us are exposed. The surveillance camera, the postmodern flaneur , does not distinguish whether you are male or female , young or old. It tracks us reflecting our images back to ourselves and , present or not , we have internalized its gaze. Panoptic vision, formerly reserved for the architecture of places of incarceration - the jail, the mental institution - has spread to the transparent enclosures of skyscrapers. I look at the woman behind her desk, see the family photo beside her coffee cup, she looks at me looking at her and at the same time, reflected in the glass, I see me looking at her. The private, the home, was the woman's enclosure and the public, the city, the entire world ,was the roaming space of men. Women heard of the world 'second hand". Now we all see the world second hand. As we cozy down on the couch we become voyeurs, the public becomes private, the atrocities mingle with the popcorn.

These paintings were begun at the residency Women and Paint at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Instead of responding to the natural environment which tends to fill everyone's vision, I chose to photograph the details of the interior of Banff Centre for the Arts - a series of modernist, institutional buildings. Unlike my other photographic experiences I was free to dwell on the overly familiar, to ponder the uncannyness of the everyday, to feel horror in the sterility of the white and chrome washrooms, to see the world through my view finder, to creep and edge myself through the florescent light and shadow. The extreme horizontal format and the title of these paintings reference and subvert the traditional panoramic landscape shot so popular in the history of Banff. In these paintings, the abstract coloured shapes which appear on the monochrome grey surface disrupt, many suggest the imagined sound of the silent scream in Munch's classic painting.

Command Scan: Painting in the Age of Mass Media