Tagny Duff, “Irene Loughlin’s Drinking in the Kitchen”, Visualeyez Scribe, May 23rd 2007

Yani Kong, “Performing Anxiety: Irene Loughlin’s Olympic Bid”, Brunt Magazine, Issue 1 2003

Yani Kong, “Paper Houses: An interview with Carly Haddon and Irene Loughlin”, 2005

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Tagny Duff, “Irene Loughlin’s Drinking in the Kitchen”, Visualeyez Scribe, May 23rd 2007

We enter into the kitchen of Latitude 53 and find a place to sit on the floor. Irene Loughlin stands behind the table and grabs a bottle of dark scotch whisky. She proceeds to take copious amounts of drink from the bottle. Then she sits down next to the kitchen table. Slowly she sinks into the chair and lays her upper torso across the table.

This is a semiotics of the kitchen – of sorts.

However, it is not the same kind of Semiotics of the Kitchen performed by Martha Rosler on video in 1975. Whereas Rosler performs (while deconstructing) the engendering of gender in language through kitchen objects, Loughlin performs the excess of the sign experienced in the throws of drunkenness. She makes martinis and margaritas to the rhythm of Rosler’s video which plays as a loop on a VHS monitor placed on the kitchen table. The two performances collide and converse. At moments, Rosler’s articulation of “fork” and motions to jab the air is juxtaposed to Irene’s chopping of lemons with a butcher knife. The audience laughs at Rosler’s exaggerated mocking gesture and simultaneously grimaces nervously at Irene’s vigorous cutting motions. The collision between Rosler’s and Loughlin’s actions produce slippage and breakdown of language. I feel it. So does the audience as Irene serves us martinis and margaritas for the hour long performance.

I watch as Irene stumbles around the kitchen. The ice dispenser on the fridge is stuck. So she walks back to the sink and grabs some ice from the bag. She proceeds to put the ice and vodka in a martini shaker and shakes vigorously. Then she pulls at the lid to open it. But it’s stuck. She tries everything to open it. It won’t open. Members from the audience offer to help. They can’t open it either. Finally Todd leaves the gallery with the shaker and comes back with it opened. Irene proceeds to make martinis and adorns them with olives and lemons. She walks around the table and hands them to people who gratefully accept them.

She pours the ice into a blender and fumbles to switch it on. The smell of burning quickly fills the kitchen. Someone from the audience suggests she put some alcohol in the blender. It needs liquid, otherwise it might burn up the motor. She pours too much vermouth in. Everyone groans. The pouring and mixing of the margaritas continues to intermix with the rhythm of Rosler’s voice “ ladle”, “knife” and “apron”. I am offered a margarita and begin to drink it, even though I am video taping.

The laughter amplifies and gets increasingly louder through the hour of drinking and watching Irene make the drinks. We are complicit and participate in her drunken, clumsy stupor. This kind of social drinking is acceptable. No-one in the room turns the offer for a drink down. The drinks are too strong—too much vermouth and vodka—mixed with strange, horrific garnishes like cucumber, cream cheese, donuts and lemon.

When all the liquor is gone, Irene stops her work. She takes a quick swig of the bottle. Before it disappears, a slight foam appears in the bottle. I realize that it is coke in the bottle. Irene is performing her drunkenness. Everyone in the room, on the other hand, is noticeably intoxicated.

Irene grabs a gun.

There is more laughing. We follow Irene out of the kitchen to the street. She walks in her high heels and apron, with determination ahead of the crowd of people following her. As we walk past a bar, one guy sees us and says, “If you were a native and carrying a gun, the cops would be here in two seconds”.
We reach a parking lot. Todd, Juliana and other people set up a shooting range against the brick wall of a building. Irene watches intently as 12 cans of beer are shaken and stacked on top of each other. The beer cans tumble, and have to be reset. We wait.

I hear the sound of cop sirens. They grow louder. I look at Irene standing in the parking lot holding the gun, and notice the nervousness in the crowd. The sirens get louder. I wonder what will happen when the cops come. Who will the take the fall for possession of a firearm- Irene or the gallery? What about the public drunkenness and consumption of alcohol? Will the cops let it slid because we are participating in art, which is often the case? I wonder at the complicity we engage in. No-one interferes with Irene’s excessive alcohol consumption. No-one in the audience or on the street stops Irene from walking down the sidewalk with a gun. Unlike pedestrians in the street, we, the invited audience, know this is a performance, and want it to “go well”.

The sirens never arrive. Irene turns her attention to the beer cans and takes aim. She shoots. She’s a straight shooter. All the cans are marked off, and one by one geysers of beer fountain. The crowd is relieved. We clap.

Irene’s staging of drunkenness in the intimate space of Latitude’s kitchen and its spillage on the streets addresses the affects of private and socially legitimized forms of substance abuse. Loughlin reverses the audience-performer role, through the manipulative strategies often employed by social drinkers. “I will drink if you will”. “I will join you in a drink”. But the drink is more than a drink. In this case, the exchange drinking is in excess of its own signification of “alcoholism” or “addiction”. To join in a drink is potentially as invigorating as it is dangerous. Like Irene, Brian Jungen also brought beer to an art audience in a recent piece Beer Cooler (2002) to “share” in a friendly exchange of “spirits”. The pretence of drinking as a form of friendship may simultaneously be read as a ritual of territorialization. Irene’s friendliness with the audience was similarly a strategic ploy. Getting the audience drunk shifted the terrain of the performance. The audience welcomed her generous gift. Yet her generosity of gift was given on false pretence, she was sober and intended the audience to experience the effects of intoxication. We followed along with her offer and directions. When she takes out a gun, we don’t doubt her motivations. We know that she will be firing the gun at some point because the program said so. But we don’t know how or when or even why, but we go along with it. We trust her, even as we walk down the street with an armed weapon, albeit only a pellet rifle.

Again, I think of the guy at the bar who stated that Native people would not be so invisible when carrying a gun. Irene knows this. The performance of shooting is a direct reference to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s performance “Shooting the Indian Act” presented in Surrey, England. In this piece Yuxweluptun shoots a paper copy of the Indian Act to protest the ongoing effects of the legislation on Indigenous People. Irene, similarly shots at cans of beers to reject the gift of alcohol and the legacy of ritualized dependency and consumption of intoxications. Within this legacy, the intimate space of ones own kitchen has the potential to become a public shooting range fraught with undercurrents of violence. Casual exchanges between friends and strangers become suspect. Micro-exchanges of these gifts (bottles of wine) are to be received with some trepidation. The semiotics of Irene’s kitchen is overfull. They spill out of the bullet-ridden holes of language, urban dwellings and city streets.

Yani Kong, “Performing Anxiety: Irene Loughlin’s Olympic Bid”, Brunt Magazine, Issue 1 2003

Nadia Comaneci’s Olympic performance on the parallel bars is an image that strikes me deeply. The actual image of Nadia in real time is lost to me, but I recall an impression I have of her in a 1984 made-for-TV movie, which contained the actual footage of her performance. Perhaps it was the Olympic footage married with elements of Nadia’s made-for-TV life of defection and eating disorder that made her image hold firmly in my mind. After seeing this movie I remember saying to my dad with great sincerity, “I want to be a gymnast”. He replied with expected parental excitement, but without the requisite gymnastic lessons required to make me “just like Nadia”, a phrase I would use repeatedly during childhood, after declaring my hope for Olympic gold. I wanted nothing more than to be a part of this, but our large family had little money to spare for gymnastic programs. I settled for makeshift balance beams (logs on the beach) and eventually the idea of being a gymnast faded away -- But, did I want to be a gymnast or did I want to be just like Nadia? In my mind there was no separation between these two ideas; I like to blame television for this confusion: To be a gymnast was to be like Nadia. The image of a gymnast, indeed Nadia’s image, is an image of grace and agility, certainly, the image of strength and girlhood.

During that time of cold war anxieties, Nadia’s success as a gymnast proved inspiring to young girls everywhere. From 1976 on, there was a significant rise in young girls’ participation in gymnastic programs in places where gymnastics had previously had minor followings. Performance artist Irene Loughlin’s own fascination with Nadia found her briefly in gymnastics during this time. Although she says, “my time on the balance beam or parallel bars found me frozen in space with a terrible fear of falling and dying”. Indeed things could have been very different for Loughlin, as well as for myself, if the gymnastics ‘thing’ had worked out. For instance, maybe the gymnastics lessons that I so desired would have began an early childhood attack on the clumsy adult I would end up being. Maybe I could have become a better, stronger, and more graceful woman — a better mind, a better body, a better job, a better car. If I had all of these things I could have a better life and a better me.

It seems we are all looking to be better. Our lives rest in the tension between personal goals, social ideals and the people we actually are. Loughlin addresses this tension in her performance work and commented in an interview with me last April,

Currently, I’m very interested in the ways we put pressure on ourselves socially and how we’re influenced to be perfect in so many ways, both physically and mentally, in order to fit some homogenous aesthetic that’s set up for us. But I don’t think any of us can ever reach or live up to it. I want to  explore those ideas in a humorous and ironic way.

Her work consistently draws from images of human perseverance and the experience of meeting the body’s own limitations. Her new work for the Live Biennial 2005 in Vancouver proposes to extend these themes in a piece inspired by Olympic images from her childhood, Nadia Comaneci and her ‘perfect 10’ in the 1976 Olympics. This piece will display a large video projection of Nadia’s famous Olympic performance with a balance beam situated in front. She has hired a team of young female gymnasts and their coach to perform in front of the projection. Beneath the beam, a news-reel style text bar will relay portions of  Comaneci’s real life story.

The piece isolates several moments of human struggle for perfection. Nadia’s struggle to achieve perfection sets the precedent for athletic young women. The young girls performing in the piece are caught in the same moment, in the same struggle. As a background conversation, Loughlin’s piece, set in Vancouver, seizes the city in a moment of similar tension: to become the perfect Olympic City by 2010. Referring to the city’s successful Olympic bid, Loughlin says, “This accomplishment is largely publicly celebrated whereas the public fallout from such  an event results in housing crises and other pressures on low income areas. This is largely ignored”.

The human struggle to achieve perfection is an issue woven into Loughlin’s overall work as a performance artist. This current piece initiates Loughlin’s original conversation between the individual and social expectation and introduces the idea of a city wide ‘reach’ for the perfection. It captures Vancouverites in a strange moment, where they are ‘reaching’ for better lives. It’s the reach, the moment of tension, caught in the act of trying, that’s the most intriguing point.

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Yani Kong, “Paper Houses: An interview with Carly Haddon and Irene Loughlin”, 2005