Category: Performance Art  Durational

Toronto, Whippersnapper Gallery and Latitude 53 Edmonton, 2013

Code Blue  and Code Blue: The Dolly and Kenny Variation (see next post) were action art or performance artwork/s exploring the memory of death, the distance and closeness between people during dying and death, and the mediation of this very personal experience by the institutions of medicine, class, and gender.

Code Blue lasted 3 days, Code Blue: The Dolly and Kenny Variation lasted 4 hours.

It used autobiographical material – the death of my brilliant and not formally educated mom. My mom had a life long battle with anxiety disorder, chronic pain, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Class affected her access to medical aid. My personal pain and vulnerability cannot be separated from critique of systemic violence or marginalization. I contrast the individually wonderful medical staff who were present with us, and the effects of mechanized and bureaucratized health-care. I feel that during her last years of life, systemic neglect increased her suffering and that of my dad.

I felt that other people might be moved if I tried to speak to this with a live image. In these works, the intention was of “channeling” my mother, not as a dead person, but as she exists through me. I was also asking myself a private question during each piece, regarding some unsolved mysteries regarding the exact cause of her death. I believed that this searching focus would add to the experience of the observers.

“Code Blue”, Whippersnapper Gallery: Discussion Den Series

The first work was framed as a conversation in which I would be present and silent, and in which other people could speak to me and each other.

I would recreate elements of my mom’s death. Using my practice of calling on the meaning invested in real objects, I created a set of Christmas lights out hundreds of my mother’s leftover pill bottles. It was May, not Christmas. I set up the Whippersnapper Gallery to suggest a bedside place and hung my mother’s hospital records from her final hospital stay. I began in earnest: I attempted to hold my breath for 20 minutes – the estimated length of time my mother was “code blue” before being placed on life support – recording failures, wrapped in her breathing tubes. I attempted to remain still, the window of the gallery, for 3 days – the length of her coma before her life support was removed.

While I tried to remain still, contemplating my mother’s coma as a coma, in I allowed myself to take breaks and recorded those failures. I would eat, use the washroom, and steady myself to return to the coma.

At times I was alone, as my mother had been at times during her coma. A key to the gallery was passed between my friends who would visit, instructed to either lock themselves in or allow passersby as they chose. Many individuals left notes. I listened to beautiful comments from individuals passing by, inside and outside the room (the window was not a sound barrier). I heard of other people’s mother’s deaths, comments about addiction, confusion about whether I was “real” or “art”, offers for help from Chinese medicine (the gallery is in China Town) , as well as expressions of concern or surprise. My friends witnessed quieter visitors who returned several times to watch me breathing under my Christmas lights. A small art crowd gathered to socialize around my coma.