Suzy Lake

Whatcha Really Really Want

Sept 10 - October 9, 2004
Opens Friday Sept 10, 7-10pm

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new photo-based work by Toronto-based Suzy Lake.Here are some words from Suzy Lake on Watcha really really want...:

"My work has always attached itself to a social context. Its base in body/identity issues has shifted from a politically romantic sixties foundation to considering the expectations raised by the twenty-first century's new heights of consumption and assumptions within youth/pop star obsession. The American Idol franchise has upped the ante.

"In the spring of 2003, Canada launched its talent search. The numbers of competitors far exceeded the expectations of the show's producers. Have we bought into fame from the comfort of our own living rooms? Or, is it 'pole sitting' for the cusp-generation? Whether it is 'to be in the culture' or a fast track to fame, its relationship to the camera was ever present throughout the process."

This series of work records the participants from the Montreal and Toronto auditions through to the tv production. To include the franchise's important element of viewer participation, an interactive photo component has been staged for gallery goers to vote for their own 'art idol'."

CANADIAN IDOL

At centre stage is a magic circle or, rather, ellipse. A small spotlighted space looking a bit like centre-ice for the opening face-off on a Hockey Night in Canada, benched players in the background. Then again, the bright lights and lurid shadows, and all that purple, mauve, and pink, suggest a drenched disco scene from the ‘eighties. But no, this is something different. That focal ellipse embossed with the Canadian Idol logo, TV-distinctive in blue, is where many, but by no means all, of the thousands of contestants from across the country want to end up to strut their star stuff, clutching a microphone. Celebrity site. Circle of popular apotheosis. An exciting space, but very exposed. Is this where you really, really want to be?

Suzy Lake, long fascinated by bodies and faces forming and deforming themselves both to meet and resist culturally normative demands, turns her camera onto this crazy phenomenon. In the general context of popular entertainment, it begins in karaoke and morphs into Reality TV; in this specific context of the Idol industry franchise, providing television entertainment for the long season, it begins with thousands-thick crowds of youth camping out through chill early-spring nights and morphs into audition-room encounters, finally to emerge as staged and televised spectacle. To locate the Montreal cadre in spring 2003, crowded into a space behind the gymnasium of the Loyola campus of Concordia University, is to see an undifferentiated mass looking more like multitudes in long-suffering but patient pursuit of tickets for a hot-item rock concert. Or, even, huddled clusters of disciples avid for the Pope's arrival. As if they themselves are not candidates for, but anticipating the coming of, celebrity. The muted excitement as sun sets and air cools is palpable. Not easy to imagine that each of these guys and young women, pretty un-cool in their appearance right now, will make up and individually face a preliminary auditioning panel next morning. Between now and then, they'll try to stay clean and dry and warm in their temporary, barricaded encampments, stoically moving in and out to use the Port-o-lets around the perimeter. In the meantime, when Suzy asks if she can turn her camera on them, they rush the barrier to banter and gesture: artless, enthusiastic, and wowed by this moment of pre-celebrity. A few weeks later, in Toronto, the Air Canada centre backgrounds even more of a nighttime party, over which a single tree casts a pastoral atmosphere. And it's a picnic: cheaply-webbed chairs, track-panted guys drinking Coca-cola, large umbrellas, improvised awnings.

The next phase is different in setting and mood. Now we're indoors, as if gathered in for a whole-school assembly. After registering, bodies will steadily fill the bleachers, awaiting a formal welcome and briefing. "One of you could well turn out as the next --and first-- Canadian Idol." Philippe, who sports decals from every Idol franchise in the world, addresses the crowd, fervently talking-up the Idol experience. Months later, he'll appear on TV, emerging from the audition session that finally drops him, savagely tearful in his shock that the judges haven't affirmed his celebrity-potential. There's a long lull as the organizing machinery clicks into gear. Muted, casual chatter on the bleachers. A few hip males parade their coolness on the floor below, somehow managing to look supremely stylish after the leveling depradations of the camp-out. A half-hour later, minor officials begin to form the groups of twenty or so who'll proceed to another building for the first round of auditions. As they wait, aspiring young women, feeling more messed-up than the guys from the night's hardships, visit one of the "Oreal (Paris)" desks for a quick make-over: It's all in the day's work for the Oreal reps as they paint a patina of celebrity on the women. Meanwhile, all around media cameras and mikes record the busy scene for the night's newscast.

Idol organization looks institutional. At the Montreal session, the handlers leading their groups from gymnasium to an old academic block could be leaders of a campus tour for prospective students, or even (you have to imagine the cords each small person holds onto) of a pre-school summer camp group. There's an incongruity at this phase that will be absent in the massive Toronto Convention Centre setting: contestants sit along a side of a long, narrow corridor, back-lit by tall nineteenth-century looking windows. The auditions are taking place in the original block of what used to be a Jesuit liberal arts college. Spring sunlight streams through and the (still muted) excitement of anticipation increases. Contestants, in smaller groups, enter a number of sanctums for their auditions, to become an Elton John, a Billy Joel, a Whitney Houston, a Celine Dion. The few who emerge with yellow cards will move on to a further audition. They're all in a world of communications and media, nursing cell phones, making and taking calls before and after --but not during-- the auditions. Cool Andrew, spied earlier parading the gymnasium floor, emerges with a yellow card. How far will he go? Perhaps this particular mild spring morning will persist, a warm, even exciting, memory even for those who end their Idol experience this day.

But these preliminaries in due time lead to the TV-phase, where an armature of technology will transform the raw material of artless mass-youth enthusiasm and anxiety into the celebrity-producing "reality" show all this stuff is designed to produce. The stage-set continues to foreground the business of media itself, with echoing monitors on the set, the guys with head-sets directing the camera preparation even as they are being photographed. Celebrity production has arrived at its wrap-in with the media event. The moment approaches for the democratic, TV-audience voted, crowning of Ryan Malcolm as Canadian Idol. What began as that scrambled, amorphous crowd of penned-up youth in a Canadian city on a cold night ends in this spangled setting redolent of the disco and the club --strobe lights and hand-held mikes and star-groomed figure. A "star" has probably not been born, but Canadian Idol has produced a passable simulacrum. And along the way, the media industry, generating huge profits, has confirmed thousands of young Canadians in their devotion to the cult of the Idol.

- Patrick Holland