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I have known Kelly Mark
for a few years. Not so long ago, she ran the bar at an
alternative gallery in Halifax called the Khyber, which was
once as famous for its raves as its parallel art
programming. The Khyber keeps up its alternative art
credentials, but its bar is licensed now, and Mark has moved
back to Hamilton. Meanwhile, her career has taken off: she
is now represented by Toronto's Wynick/Tuck Gallery; she
will join a few other Canadian artists in the next Sydney
Biennial; and she has just had a solo show at the Art
Gallery of Ontario.
Mark's art is successful because of
the way it marries high art and working class culture. Too
often we let ourselves believe the entertainment industry's
moronical stereotypes of working class life. Mark presents
the materials of everyday work with seriousness and dignity.
Her work fits one conceptualist tradition of not expecting
art to do social work the way a poster is used in a
strike.
High art can allow for a complicated,
multi-faceted engagement with life that programmatically
Marxist art, for example, cannot be expected to.
Some of the knives and salt shakers in
this exhibition are souvenirs of Mark's waitress jobs. She
once worked at Canadian Tire, and she uses Canadian Tire
materials in her work. She makes beautiful things in an
obsessive way, reminding us that early minimalists such as
Carl Andre made working class references in their art which
have been lost to us (Mark tells me that she wants to buy a
time clock so that she can punch-in to her studio like it
was a wage job--what could better illustrate her
working-class bent!).
On one wall of her Ace Art/Site
Gallery show Mark hung twenty salt shakers in two pristine
plexi boxes just below eye level. The social reference here
is plain but understated. Mark often talks about "beauty"
being a priority in her work, but she also speaks about the
slow-burn violence of low-end jobs. Her stack of salt
shakers, so precariously poised at the edge of collapse
(less real than visible) is a monument to tables set
countless times daily by waiters in restaurants; the video
in which she stares into the camera for 33 minutes reminds
me of employee monitoring; her orchestrated and counted
pounding of wood and metal and her balled waste paper pieces
relate, at least for me, to the repetitious labour which
gives polish to commodities and a gleam to the eye of good
service. As minimalist as Mark's work is, then, so too is it
richly allegorical, full of working class references related
to its readymade restaurant and hardware materials.
Many artists of Mark's generation (she
is thirty) have rebelled against their expressionist painter
"mothers" in favour of their post-minimalist and
conceptualist "grandmothers". Mark employs materials and
methods which have recently become canonical or even
historical; at first glance it looks like the work of a much
older artist, a minimalist or conceptualist artist of the
1960s avant-garde, and not the work of a young woman. Liz
Magor used canning jars twenty years ago, Aganetha Dyck used
them ten years ago, and Mark uses them now, but as Mark
repeats a time-worn motif or method, she always provides a
twist which enlivens the tradition. Her virtual versions of
service-industry labour are repeated as if in a dream,
whereas, for earlier artists such as Hanne Darboven and On
Kawara, repetitive strategies were given poetic resonances
of a different, more literary sort.
Back in the 1960s, Jackie Winsor and
Eva Hesse refined and/or repeated and/or reconfigured and/or
symbolically re-assigned and/or appropriated minimalist and
conceptual art practices to make 'post-minimalist' work
which had a feminist bent. Mark's generation assumes that
the patents have long expired on process, minimalist and
conceptual methods, that the strategies have been fully
absorbed into the methodology of contemporary art making,
and that their use in new art can mean just about anything
that the artist would like. To repeat my argument for Mark's
work, in this case that means contemplating the working
class ethos out of which this high art is made.
Cliff Eyland is an artist/writer /independent who has
exhibited widely throughout Canada. His recent work entitled
ID
Paintings is currently showing as
part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery's Manitoba Studio Series.
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