Getting the real feeling

Girl fever despite the Madonna connection in exhibition

Girl fever is getting 'deeper and deeper', to quote Madonna, the quintessential historical reference for girl culture. The Art Gallery of York University is having its own slumber party, and all us girls (and some guys too) are invited. The only kind of blah thing about it all, is that it departs from a curatorial premise or response to Madonna's video - what it feels like for a girl. Yes, the title works to unify the theme of the exhibition. But does this video really speak to anything authentically girl?
Directed by Madonna's husband Guy Ritchie, one can imagine the two of them in a tete-a-tete debating the surest means to get the video 'banned' and hence 'labelled' as controversial. Surely the culture of girl comes from something a little more legit or at least personal than the boring and outdone rebellion for rebellion's sake. Surely feminism has moved beyond this. Ooh, what a statement, Madonna's running around shooting men like some sniper. What intellectual subtlety. Isn't the rise of girl culture something less overt, more complex in its undertaking? Or is it just the pop veneer of 'anything boys can do, girls can do better'?
Despite this Madonna-response tactic, the exhibit itself elicits a cool array of artistic production, as well as a host of academic heavyweights to discuss gender and all its warm, fuzzy, belligerent tentacles. Five prominent Toronto women artists, musicians and performers - Karma Clarke-Davis, Louise Liliefeldt, Peaches (with Kara Blake and j.d. Samson), Fiona Smyth, and Julie Voyce have been given free reign to create new works for what it feels like for a girl, ranging from performance to painting and printmaking to music video. In tandem with the exhibition, a discussion panel Gender Fictions/Realities: Feminist Readings of what it feels like for a girl will feature York University professors: Janine Marchessault (Film and Video), Caitlin Fisher (Fine Arts/Cultural Studies), Karen Stanworth (Art History), and Elizabeth Seaton (Communications and Culture). All of this, I think, showcases the fact that the feminist debates in art and in academe are alive and kicking.
Each of these, explains Philip Monk, newly appointed Director/Curator, "embody the spirit of the namesake's expression without necessarily trying to conform to its anti-conformist message". Girl at the gallery is a pastiche of fun, exaggerated sexualities, and androgynous question marks. Fiona Smyth especially, has been single-mindedly leading the pack in and through cartographies of female desire for over a decade. She has shown us 'what it feels like for a girl' through the inside-outed body, the fallopian tubes, the ecstatic layering of colour over sketch, into her own splendid iconography - she has captured in paint the heated choreography of female lust.
Zsa Zsa gallery will also host a complementary programme with work from the same artists represented at the York exhibition. Or if you don't mind leaving the downtown core, take a ride on the Girl Airlines - a 'performance bus' provides audience members with an instructional journey of 'all things girlie' with writer/performer Mariko Tamaki.
Whatever age, whatever gender you are, what it feels like for a girl is sure to activate your inner 'girl'. And it's well worth discovering, even if you are sick to death of Madonna!
what it feels like for a girl shows at the Art Gallery of York University, 4700 Keele Street, until February 1, 2004. Call 416.736.5169 or visit www.yorku.ca/agyu

Publication Date: 2003-12-07
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3420