Where were the Mothers? Essays

A long time coming

By Peggy Gale

This exhibition comes together from complex circumstances, one part of which is surely a mother’s love.

Linda Duvall lost a son. Nothing can change that fact. She sought to make connections with others who have also lost children – adult children – who fell into crime or ruinous addictions, or had mental health problems. Often they were written off as simply “known to police.” Some are dead now; some are beyond redemption; none are forgotten. Any mother must suspect her own culpability. “Where were the mothers” when things went so wrong?

The current project has deep roots. Linda Duvall studied sociology and English at university, then took an Education degree before attending the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and later, completing an MFA degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. These studies were spread out over several years, with various projects and other employment in the interim. As she began to focus on her art practice, Duvall’s earlier life experiences brought her to socially oriented subject material, using performance and installation to explore memory, narrative and personal exchange. In 1993 she moved to Saskatoon with husband and children to begin teaching at the University of Saskatchewan, where the wide prairie landscape and smaller urban setting marked a radical change from their former life out east.

Having grown up in rural Ontario, Duvall is accustomed to small-town habits and inquisitiveness. The formation of individual identity within society has been an ongoing concern. Using “ordinary” language in familiar settings she often collaborates with others to develop dialogues that reveal subtle underlying meanings inherent in personal interaction and response.

Memories and stories have been conjured for numerous installations, media and exhibition projects. Narrative is a means of revealing both truth and invention, and a means of rehearsing, explaining and remembering.

In 1997 she presented Traducción/Translation at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Guatemala City, and subsequently at The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon, superimposing handwritten texts in Spanish and English on panoramic black and white images of the open prairie. The sentences are ambivalent as they reflect on the difficulties of immigrants’ experience of Saskatchewan. “We think Saskatoon is a very beautiful place and we are going to try to do the best for our children,” in one case, but elsewhere, “You can really feel the discrimination.” There is admission of loneliness, a longing for home, possibly speaking to Duvall’s own memory of her first months in a “foreign” landscape.

Female confidences and conversational exchange have long been of interest. In 1999 the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon mounted Tea Gone Cold, an installation that was part of three linked exhibitions collectively titled Antipathies and Correspondences.1 In the first of two rooms she laid out a long, narrow table covered in satiny white fabric and small satin-wrapped packages with trailing threads – stones, actually ¬– strewn randomly on its surface. A second room was suffused with light and hung with soft white curtains, overstitched in pale outline with images from familiar paintings and photographs: Breughel’s Peasant Wedding, Millet’s Gleaners, or a portrait of Diana and Prince Charles with their two young sons. Quiet voices murmur in the room from hidden speakers, telling overlapping stories written by Duvall – but reinterpreted as if overheard and remembered inexactly. The son who left home, never reconciled with his father: “He didn’t call for six years,” then, surprisingly, “He’s doing fine – living in California now.” Or another voice, “There was always this absence in our house,” and “I wouldn’t go back to that farm for anything you would give me.” Wisps of old family stories appear, recollections from a grandmother whose son died at just seventeen; in memory the long-dead lad is brilliant, increasingly wonderful with the passing years. As the spoken phrases accumulate, we notice that repetition is never precise; subtle changes creep in to shift the emphasis or fill in gaps. Collectively these intimate stories and quiet voices invite us to become part of the conversation, see how each fragment might apply to our own lives, just as we guess that the original narratives found their form from Duvall’s own experience.

Duvall returned to conversation as performance for Tea and Gossip in 2003, an audio and video-based project inviting participation from gallery visitors in a situation established in advance with “a cast of characters, a troubling event, diverse opinions, and tea and cookies.”2 The circumstances offered choices for various interpretations of the stories, suggesting oral history reinvented as a kind of “whodunit.”

Her next Toronto exhibition was far darker. In February 2005 the Red Head Gallery mounted Duvall’s Lament, the press release pointing out the historical role of public lament as “a meaningful and cathartic process.” An accompanying brochure describes her video in graphic terms, with “footage of Duvall herself being taken at gunpoint on the lawn of her Saskatoon home.”3 These events were linked to her son’s recent involvement with crystal meth, as a wave of drug use in the area brought sweeping and aggressive police intervention in all suspected cases. As Daniel Baird writes,

. . . one knows something terrible is unfolding without understanding what it is. The video’s jolting quality reflects the fleeting and disassociated character of some of our worst and extreme experiences. Duvall’s video not only evokes the arbitrariness, vulgarity, and ignorance of coercive power, but more importantly, it suggests that trauma, failure, and tragedy create gaps in the continuity of our lives which are in retrospect difficult to grasp. Laments are ritual public acts that offer neither consolation nor justice, but at least seek to bridge these gaps.4

Duvall used her exhibition to consider the confusions and anxiety of her recent past in a public arena, opening her experience to broader application and no longer simply personal. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to “join in the lament with the assistance of the texts provided.” It was a forceful, dramatic presentation.

But an email followed just two years later, on January 29, 2007:
We regret to announce the death of Jesse Allan Loewy age 23 at the farm on O’Malley. . . .5
Brief and devastating, the announcement had a sense of inevitability.

For her exhibition She Can’t Begin at Red Head Gallery in November of that year, the press release is brutally clear:

Drug addiction. Suicide. Grief. Aspects of life that we are uncomfortable facing, talking about, and writing about. A 23-year old inexplicably goes back to using crystal meth after 3 years of being clean and recovering well from the effects of earlier use. He is dead within three days.

The video is silent, with long, steady views of fields and farm buildings, a path lined with struggling little trees. Duvall’s words are superimposed on these images, a quiet musing on how to go forward, what to do next.

As she writes later:
I had thought that the issue with the drugs was difficult, but I was totally unprepared for dealing with Jesse’s suicide. Maybe because of dealing with the shooting and then having him back with me and clean, I had let down my guard in terms of worrying about what could happen. [She Can’t Begin] pretty much indicates what I have and have not been doing since Jesse’s death.6

No one can help her, really. Despite her efforts to reach out to others, to find professional help, to share her grief and confusion with family members, she must confront her feelings of guilt and irretrievable loss pretty much on her own. In 2008, BlackFlash published a small booklet for Duvall, Desperately Sorry, a collection of friends’ emails expressing their condolences.

All of this stands behind the current project. In first charting plans for Where Were The Mothers? Duvall spoke of “individuals who have taken alternative life paths.” In time, one understands these alternatives as drugs, prison, prostitution or other situations – not necessarily a matter of choice – and reads the euphemisms as a means of covering both blame and shame. Someone else might refer to a child’s “self-medication” that is really an admission of excess drinking or drug use. We all want things to be “okay” or at least hope they will look that way in public.

Almost at once, naming becomes an issue. “Mother” is all right as a term, but “children” is hardly applicable here, whatever the age of the person before us. “Participant” becomes an acceptable title, a term suggesting the active part being taken, but one without implied “fault” or blame. The mothers feel voiceless, invisible; the sons are dead.

Duvall has chosen to open a new door for these willing participants, inviting them to create a song about their mothers with the help of professional musicians and studio facilities; at the same time she has interviewed many mothers of troubled – or deceased – offspring for their own sense of what happened, and what might follow. For this exhibition we see edited portions of the mothers’ stories in one series of closely-framed video images. Opposite are excerpts recording the creation of participants’ songs, then the final mixed compact-disk with edited lyrics and back-up musicians in place. The songs are ready now for public response: the new voices each with its chilling back story, all clear enough when close attention is paid to the words and to performers’ faces.

The range of sentiment is remarkable. Only one song offers direct apology. For most there is admission of problems unresolved, both past and present, and a lot of anger:

My life is one big hell.
There’s evil in my house.
See me. Hear me.
I needed your love.
You made me what I am but I’ve survived, left the past behind.
If you regret mostly the things that never were …
Mama’s light it guides me still
Please don’t kick me like you did when I was down.
I did my time, I don’t regret it, not one bit.
I paid for everything.
I learned from Mom, you can’t rely on help.
Mamma you were always there for me
Mama was trying to make things better.
It takes everything, everything I have.
Try your best to understand this, mama girl.
I’d rather see you dancing than crying.

We only hear a fragment of any story. There is pain here, tears or rueful acknowledgment, and very few moments of bright memory. The faces tell us something too – a pretty young native girl, or an older woman with tired eyes, missing teeth and sagging folds of skin. A tattoo. The men seem rough, their eyes tentative. The interaction between participants, struggling with their words, and the professional musicians, trying out cadences, suggesting rhymes, is halting too: none of this work was easy.

But now we have these songs: the real thing. For many visitors to the exhibition, or listeners to the CDs, this is alien territory. We may be uncomfortable with these lives. Yet – as Duvall insists – they all had mothers, they came from families of some sort, the history lies buried there. The words of the mothers – not mothers of these participants but nonetheless women bearing their own pain or anger in response to what their children did, or felt, and what became of them – are no less poignant. The rest of the tale lies in what remains unspoken.

As Duvall muses, “The thing that always confuses me [in telling this story] is that Jesse was such a warm loving son, smart, funny, involved, etc. There is this big gap between the words that describe his activities before he died, and the overall picture. I have the same reaction to the participants in the project. They also are the most endearing and interesting group of people.” Further, “… I came to know these people as complex individuals, much more interesting than the labels that society has placed on them. I think that connection shows in the videos.”7

These are performances with considerable appeal, yet we need not “enjoy” the video interviews or documentation. Neither are we here to judge the participants nor to assess and blame or exonerate the mothers. The songs offer a form of present history, a self-portrait telling much about Canada’s social realities today and the role played by racial factors. It is important that the mothers and participants come from both Saskatoon and Toronto, the two homes of the artist and her family since 1993. Duvall has implied comparisons of site before: Saskatoon and Oshawa for example, for Enough White Lies to Ice a Wedding Cake (2005), the cities similar in size but opposite in demeanor: the one a university town, the other dependant on automobile production. Saskatoon and the Toronto area are compared on different terms: the gangs and large native population of the one, the urban concentration of addiction and mental illness on the other. Both cities share a layer of disenfranchisement and poverty.

In Where were the Mothers? Linda Duvall seeks answers to her own dilemma. Was there anything she could have done to prevent what happened? Was any of this her fault? In asking other mothers and other “children” what happened to them, how it all played out, what any of them might say now, given the chance, she shows the complexity of both question and answer. Nothing is simple; there are no final answers; these are the witnesses.

Peggy Gale
Toronto / October 2009

Notes

  1. Peggy Gale, “Tea Gone Cold,” Antipathies and Correspondences: Rae Staseson, Linda Duvall, Joanne Bristol. Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, 1999.
  2. Press Release for Tea and Gossip, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, January 29, 2003. Tea and Gossip was re-staged at Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, in February/March 2004.
  3. Daniel Baird, Lament, Red Head Gallery, Toronto. 2005.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Linda Duvall by email on January 29, 2007 to Peggy Gale and others.
  6. Linda Duvall to Peggy Gale by email on November 2, 2007.
  7. Linda Duvall to Peggy Gale by email on October 14, 2009.

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Singing the Abject and Listening Obliquely

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

When I began writing songs as a teenager, I was looking for a way to say things that I couldn’t otherwise say to an audience that wouldn’t – and perhaps couldn’t – otherwise hear them. Because they involve poetry, songs were a medium through which I could express feelings, ideas, and stories that, like the sun that blinds when looked at directly, require to be told obliquely. Through songs, I wanted to make stories that were otherwise too painful, violent, and sorrowful, to be palatable and digestible.

Today, television talk shows have become the preferred mode for sharing and witnessing suffering – for confessing and processing violence and grief. Rather than leading us to a deeper understanding of each other’s and our own pain, the staging of the confessional talk show allows us to not only further distance ourselves from the confessors, but from the echoes of our own stories. Like circus acts, we want/need the confessional talk show to remind us that we are neither as terrible nor as remarkable as those whose acts of confession we witness. In this age of reality TV, Linda Duvall offers an alternative space within which to engage in the sharing of the abject. She offers us an opportunity to both witness the act of confession, while also giving us a view into the staging of the confession so that we may be able to see ourselves, our own suffering, and even perhaps our own implication in other people’s suffering.

Duvall cracks the dressing room doors for us so that we may see beyond the catharsis of listening to someone else’s pain, which the songs, because they are oblique, can allow otherwise to pass without consequence. She invites us to see the raw materials that make the song and the various pieces of fabric from which the participants and musicians weave the veils through which we might witness their stories. Duvall brings these veils together, casting light and shadows on the confessionary stage and inviting us to listen both directly – to the songs – and obliquely – to the stories behind them, including the stories that shape how we listen and what we hear. The encounters between participants and songwriters that Duvall offers to us allow us to witness not only the songs – the confessional object itself – but the relational space from which that object translates story into song. In this way, Duvall constructs the kind of “transitional space” that Elizabeth Ellsworth argues can serve as a “hinge” to move past the confessional and into an encounter with ourselves.

In Where were the Mothers? these hinges are often subtle. For instance, rather than giving us a direct glance of the very mothers in question, Duvall directs our gaze to their hands. While these mothers did not get to write their own songs, their stories are dressed not in music, but in the minimalist choreography of their expressive hands. She invites us to hear their – and perhaps her own – stories differently, not by looking directly at (or for) them, but by looking obliquely through their hands so that we may perhaps be able to listen better. This is also not unlike what the conventions of songwriting do to the stories of the participants. What the songs deliver is likewise an opportunity to hear these stories indirectly, through the cloak that various musical genres – bluegrass, reggae, aboriginal, alternative or smooth rock, etc. – provide. As listeners we bring our own relationships to these musical styles and listen to the music while listening for the story. Yet the story remains hidden behind melodies, chord progressions, drumbeats, vocal inflections, and the selected story fragments that remain once the song is complete. Yet, it may be precisely because the songs require that we listen obliquely that we may be able to “hear” beyond the story.

Songs are a way to say without saying, to dress up the stories (and therefore ourselves) in a cloak that allows us to both say and hear what is otherwise unsayable – what we refuse to witness without the staging of the confessional. These abject stories – stories of drug abuse, crime, prison, life in the streets, child abuse, and abandon – are necessary in the construction of the normative narrative that allow the rest of us to be subjects. Deviance is only deviance in relationship to an accepted norm, and that norm requires deviance in order to enforce itself as norm; the abject “other” provides confirmation for an otherwise taken-for-granted “normality.” The catharsis that these songs provide is then not only the manifestation of our emotional resonance with these stories, but more importantly, of our deferred complicity in other people’s suffering. The songs become the pivot that allows us to listen to a story that we otherwise do not want to hear and in the process revealing our implication in the very stories we are witnessing; without the stories, there is no catharsis and no confirmation of normalcy.

Duvall invites us to witness the abject so that we can come face to face with that which we would much rather ignore by keeping in the margin but which is necessary for the enforcement of normality. She invites us to re-ask what seems at first like the obvious question: where were the mothers? But this time, she draws inside the stories and establishes a relational space in which the audience is a part of the story, implied in the experiences of suffering that define through negation our own experiences of happiness, comfort, and freedom. The cathartic space that the contrast between the beauty of the songs and the tragedy of the stories produce is at once a place of reckoning as well as, perhaps, a place of forgiveness. This forgiveness is only possible, however, if we can see the abject within ourselves by listening obliquely.

It would be a mistake, then, to rest on the catharsis that these songs and stories might provoke, as the catharsis is itself an indication that we are implied in the stories that Duvall stages for us. We cannot simply switch the channel, wondering where these people came from or “where were their mothers.” If we take Duvall’s invitation to be more than an audience to the confessional act, we must refuse to walk away from her work untouched and untaught. Duvall is inviting us to witness the dance of our own hands in the hands of the mothers, hinting that perhaps the answer is simple; as Star puts it in her song, “we are the mothers of the un-mothered.”

NOTES
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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Engaging Strangers

David Garneau

Linda Duvall engineers temporary relationships between strangers. Her social engagement art works bring people together to share stories across divides of culture, class and region. She uses artifice to encourage authenticity. These initially awkward meetings soon melt barriers to reveal a common humanity. The projects are fuelled by a faith in the healing properties of purposeless dialogue. Success is measured by feelings of quality engagement rather than the achievement of some end. The work is goalless but not guileless. The encounters are not ephemeral; Duvall records some of the sessions, others can be eavesdropped, so we can marvel at the richness of interpersonal discourse.

Duvall’s efforts are sincere fun that tears at the barriers between the public and private, self and other, propriety and honesty. While Polygraph and Reinvented had their measure of angst, and there were tensions in Tea and Gossip, with Where were the Mothers? the artist moves beyond art/play and into fragile, emotional territory fraught with ethical danger. Duvall invited professional musicians to help amateurs compose songs about their mothers. The budding songwriters are folks whom she euphemistically refers to as “individuals who have taken alternate life paths;” by which she means addicts, prostitutes, petty criminals and other chronic strugglers. All have complicated relationships with their moms and some of the women have children who have equally complex feelings about them: “This song is about my mama/She doesn’t even take the time to know me/My mom doesn’t even try to commen and fucken visit me / Throw it up for the best momz in the world.”

To some viewers, the project will be about social justice; it gives voice to the voiceless. To others, it may seem exploitative: musicians mining their collaborator’s pain for musical gold. This certainly is a concern. In the Age of American Idol, offering amateurs access to the means of music production is freighted with a promise beyond self-expression, whether Duvall intends it or not. While the plan was for an intimate collaboration between mentor and mentee, and the songs are only likely to receive modest circulation, some participants must have imagined the possibility of fame. Whatever their dreams, these are adults; the contracts are professional; everyone owns the rights to their own work.

The video clips suggest that the collaborations were supportive and affirmative. The participants appear proud to develop their skills and share their thoughts and feelings. There are flashes of pleasure as they sing in the recording studio. And everyone looks serious and determined to do a good job. These scenes discourage scepticism. However, there is a disjunction between the music and the interviews—and this is where the art work resides.

The lyrics break down into two camps. Most participants shied away from hip-hop posturing in favour of folk and blues singer-song writer sincerity and an inmate’s melancholy and regret: ‘I love you mom,’ ‘I forgive you,’ ‘I know I disappointed you,’ ‘I’ll turn things around, become a role model.’ Whether it is the work of the musicians or the participants or a collaboration, these lyrics, however raw, represent experience tamed. In most cases, wrenching lives are condensed and the pain aestheticised into conventional morality tales of loss and redemption. The songs are earnest, the musicianship fine. Some seem to be struggling to communicate rough experience in a beautiful medium. Sometimes, the medium wins.

The second group barely contains their rage. Their voices pick scabs: “And if you know that there are only cages/and that your own mom was really just the first. “There’s evil in my house, it’s taken weeks for me to even get between the sheets on my bed/I cut myself deep, to see if I can bleed/Oh there’s such a lot of healing ahead.”

Duvall is not a record producer and the CD she facilitated is not the art in Where were the Mothers? Accompanying the disk and the ‘making of’ video in the exhibition are heart-rending interviews with the participants and with distraught mothers of wayward, ruined and dead children. Unlike the songs, the interviews are undigested and difficult to assimilate. One of the older female participants explains, “I can just love her as a mother, what I think a mother might be, and that’s how I love her. I sense her love and that way I don’t have her kicking me in the face when I’m down.” What is the appropriate response to this? The experience is unbearable. We know that these are just fragments from lives beyond most of our ability to reckon, or they re-stir personal nightmares.

When a young man is successful, it takes a village to raise a child. When he’s an addict or criminal, the chorus asks ‘Where was the Mother?”. It is reasonable to look for a source for suffering. The mother’s body, the genesis of us all, seems an appropriate place to start. Did she eat properly, did she drink, was she depressed? And later, was she loving, stifling, absent? Those of us with minor miseries probe for a deviation, a butterfly wing that sets off later storms. This research is not science but story, chronicles designed to make sense of our lives and contain pain so we can get on with living. Their purpose is not to be true but useful.

Blame narratives that initially seemed revelatory eventually lose their power with re-telling and maturity. As our formation becomes background and circumstance, re-formation begins and we learn to own ourselves. In circles of perpetual self-narration (AA meetings, psychotherapy) blame narratives have little currency. We demand different stories of recovering addicts, criminal and survivors. If you are to be tolerated, assisted, rescued, understood, believed and loved, you need a chronicle. If you are a deviator looking to re-enter the mainstream, you need to confess and repent; you need a convincing narrative that insures your listeners that one chapter is closed and another has opened.

Listening to these sorts of life stories is a tense pleasure. We descend with the story teller into hell but feel comforted by knowing that, despite the frightening adventure, our hero will be triumphant, redeemed; after all, there she is, before us, alive, safe, healthy, and on a good path. Most narrative art reflects this cathartic convention. There is a beginning, middle and end. Harrowing is hearing the life story that is perpetual middle.

Among the things that make Where were the Mothers? so powerful, is that none of the stories feel retrospective. Most seem a slice from the sticky middle. The sense of irresolution, no dénouement or even climax, just a series of trials, creates a feeling of despair. However, brief moments of pride underline themes of survival and hope. The exhibition is eviscerating, with only occasional and unreliable glimpses of pleasure. The authenticity of the participants and their sincere efforts to condense their experience and feelings into a single three minute song is poignant and emotionally devastating. My general feeling after experiencing this courageous work is that chronic substance abuse, criminality and other self-harming deviant life-styles are completely perplexing. Anyone who thinks they have global solutions to such intimate problems has not experienced this exhibition or those lives.

Art cannot change the world; but it helps.

Notes

1 Mogaley
From Mom’z Art
Songwriter – Mogaley,
Singer – Mogaley
Producer – Glenn Ens
Musician – Joseph Naytowhow (drums)

2 Star. From Mothers of The Unmothered
Songwriters – Jon Brooks, Ingrid Star Milford
Vocals – Ingrid Star Milford
Musicians – Jon Brooks, Pat Simmonds
Producers – Jon Brooks, Pat Simmonds

3 Brinn From Sweep My Crackhouse Clean
Songwriters – Marianne Girard/Brinn c Socan 2009
Singers – Brinn, Marianne Girard
Producer – Marianne Girard @ Fire Escape Recording, Toronto,
Engineer – Adam Gabourie
Musicians – Marianne Girard – guitar, John Jackson – slide guitar

4 Chris

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