Another Woman

Marie-Ève Charron —

At the time of writing these lines, an election campaign has been launched in Québec to choose a new government. The traditional and digital media are on high alert and are promising close coverage of the politicians on the ground. For its part, the cityscape has been rapidly decked out with election posters featuring the portrait of their candidates in a style that no longer stands out. Despite this demanding activity, many claim that they feel indifferent, or even cynical about the political class, which they immediately presume to be hypocritical. Kim Waldron could be counted among these people. She admits that she has for a long time thought of politics as consisting of nothing but lies and this is what, among other things, one day drove her to run her own campaign and present herself as an independent candidate in the Papineau riding for the 2015 federal election.

Were it not for Waldron’s artist status, as well as her intention to make a work of art with it, this project would probably not have attracted much attention. Instead her experience engendered Public Office (2014–2016), a marathon work synthesizing several issues addressed in her practice that spans over more than 15 years and which this essay proposes to encompass. In the period that led up to her electoral campaign, the artist presented a mini survey exhibition at Galerie Thomas Henry Ross art contemporain that provided the impetus for this publication. A dense grid of photographs displaying selected fragments from Kim Waldron’s series, which disregarded both the frames that previously separated the images and the chronology that organized them up to then. Embracing the same approach, my retrospective gaze seeks to focus on the artist’s work without confining it to the notion of self-portraiture to which it could be reduced.

In combining photography with performance Kim Waldron sets up an imagery in which the identity of the subject takes shape and, through the stances it adopt and roles it plays, encounters various sites of power presumed to be natural. From one series to the next, she exposes the conditions of her agency in situations that unfold in the fields of work, politics and art, and by developing unconventional representations of women within them. Her art reveals the gender inequalities and asymmetrical power relations that, in order to be effective in the real, are also developed as fantasy projections. In this production, which does not hesitate to merge fact and fiction, the distinction between private and public is put to the test by establishing a relation between personal life and citizen engagement. Waldron’s works thereby once again validate the feminist credo that the “personal is political” and make use of images and performance as heuristic tools that make it possible to go beyond the art world.

The Family Romance

In 2015 Kim Waldron published her memoir with the goal of making herself better known among people of the riding she had chosen to campaign in for the federal election. The publication preceded the release of Justin Trudeau’s autobiography, which was announced six months before on the CBC website. For a 42 year-old, son of a renowned prime minister and head of his party, this

seemed an obvious move. For Waldron, the project seemed more bizarre, only 35 years old at the time, she had rarely or never been in the limelight. The “everyday” quality of her life goes contrary to what should usually be the grounds for an autobiography, but the artist status endows the act of telling one’s story with an additional dimension that is part of a long tradition, as exemplified by the “lives of the artists” genre. Since the Renaissance, and with nascent versions going all the way back to Antiquity, artist biographies are replete with commonplaces and anecdotes that root personal development path in innate talent and a precocious drive to create. Artist autobiographies do not appear to be an exception to such commonplaces. However, with Waldron, the narrative quite openly reveals a path filled with obstacles and great hesitations in which natural talent does not play a role. A toying with various small trades, abandoned ambitions and dogged efforts make up the storyline of the book called Honesty, Hope and Hard Work. A tad tongue in cheek, the title alludes to the federal Liberal’s slogan: Hope and Hard Work.

Yet, the text has its share of spicy anecdotes that contribute to establishing a legend around the artist, whose disclosed biographical elements invariably feed the interpretation of her works. Knowing that Kim Waldron sees a little bit of herself in her paternal grandmother, who was a Rockette in New York, and that she had entertained the idea of becoming a fighter pilot in the American army resonates with a production that draws on self-display in various roles. More than the anecdotes themselves, it is the autobiographic genre that is worth highlighting; a form that Kim Waldron chose after receiving the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, which in return required the artist to produce an exhibition along with a publication. Waldron put the fellowship to good use by leaving traditional art modes behind and opting for an autobiography that was to play a role in her electoral campaign. Without knowing it at the outset, Waldron had already crossed paths with her riding’s most famous adversary whose main party financier is Stephen Bronfman.

The artist’s personal story also evokes what Philippe Lejeune calls the “autobiographic pact.” According to this theory the author recounts his or her story frankly and without omitting the less impressive moments of his or life. In return, the readership, who presupposes the author’s authenticity, must show some leniency. It is on this constructed, yet presumed to be true basis that the conditions for believing in the story are established. Coming from Kim Waldron, the autobiographic genre is hardly surprising, though its does make the reception of her work ambiguous. Does she not try to blur the boundary between fact and fiction and to obscure the evidence? Why wouldn’t this written testimony make use of the same strategies? Moreover, aren’t there many reasons to believe so? The desire to root the work in biographical material goes back to the artist’s first works among which The Dad Tapes/The Mom Photographs (2007) project is emblematic.

The two-part work gathers family photographs taken at the same time by her parents; the gaze of the other is supported by two different technologies, but fixed on the same scenes. The video Chronology compiles thirty years of memories, consisting of still and moving images that unfold as a conventional family chronicle with members striking poses and contributing to creating images the purpose of which is to keep happy memories alive. In Sunsets, an assemblage of framed photographs and a video focus on the subject of twilight. The stubborn recurrence of the gesture speaks of the parents’ fascination with the spectacle of which the recorded results are quite disappointing, due to the backlighting, while they do seek to be the expression of a resolute desire to encapsulate the source of their shared wonder for the same thing. This “prosthetic memory,” as Celia Lury terms it, confirms the stability of the family unit and the union of the couple in a structure that draws on storytelling and the image. This apparatus, based on the selection and the process, reveals the mechanisms of the narrative identity that plays itself out in personal life, but which today’s social media have pushed into the public sphere. In this regard, Kim Waldron’s archives testify to a bygone era in which the boundaries between private and public life were more sealed off. Moreover, the artist made use of an old fashioned look, inspired by her childhood, to display her works in

Montreal from 2008 to 2010. A decor in which home accessories framed her projects in the context of an actual apartment (Gallery Werner Whitman with the centre Articule) or a shopping mall corridor (Art souterrain, Montreal), which highlighted the redefinition of the relationships between private and public spheres.

In a recurrent manner Kim Waldron explores the dynamics between these spheres. The series Triples (2009) varied this approach by this time insisting on the idea of the couple. The child from the family photo albums grows into an adult and displays herself in the domestic intimacy of couples, all of whom responded to a call she put out as part of an artist residency in Vienna. With the respective couples’ collaboration in the development of the scenes, Waldron insinuated herself into their daily activities (cleaning up, cooking, meals, relaxation…); she posed as a third figure who symbolically disturbs the unity of the couple, like an unconscious presence of otherness that affects the plenitude of their union. Created in the country of Freud, the series sought to be an echo of his book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) which set the role of culture as a means to curb instinctive drives by regulating taboos and sexual and moral prohibitions. In its most autobiographic dimensions, Waldron’s work reactivates the Freudian mechanism of the “family romance,” a fantasy and narrative process in which a child invents him or herself by modulating ingredients taken from a real family to construct a fictional one.

She was subsequently to present herself in her images of a mother to be. At the end of Beautiful Creatures (2010–2013), a project that led Waldron to prepare the meat of animals she had herself slaughtered, she invited the public to share a country feast in the idyllic setting of Deschambault-Grondines, where, busily working in the kitchen and serving guests while wearing her grandmother’s apron, she reveals that she is pregnant with her first child. The passage from the home kitchen to the public meal is not trivial and can be translated as the affirmation of a social success that goes beyond private life. Moreover, between Newfoundland and Deschambault-Grondines, two private meals and four public buffets were offered by the artist, who in all cases cooked her meat. The entire process of Beautiful Creatures could be seen as a response to a need to test the limits of the individual sphere so as to evoke a social accomplishment. It is to demystify the activity that brings food to our plates and to put the consumed animal back in its initial context as meat, that Kim Waldron laid out the rules for this project that emerged during a residency at the English Harbour Arts Centre, in Newfoundland. She photographically documented the transformation stages from the slaughtering, preparation of the meat cuts and cooking in the kitchen, all of which she carried out herself. The proposed imagery remains far removed from the industrial model that usually supplies food stores for everyday consumption and which divides the operations into a dehumanizing chain. It is instead with the complicity of small breeders that the artist carried out her plan, and this is in artisanal slaughter conditions that are guided by a work ethic of self-sufficiency. The roughness of the images, depicting the blows dealt to the animals and the cutting up of the carcasses, gives a sense of the physical exertion and the artist’s actual body as captured by a rapidly clicked photograph in which the visual composition is nevertheless paid heed to.

The artist’s personal question regarding the provenance of what we eat is thus reflected in a shared visual display, both in the photographic documentation and the meals offered during public events. The Do-It-Yourself Cookbook artist book also pursues this goal of a collective sharing in which DIY culture enables the individual to reclaim power over his or her life by way of experimentation and the appropriation of actions that are generally carried out by corporations of various sizes.

Among the documentation put together for this project, a rare image offers a glimpse back into the artist’s home environment. The photograph in question depicts one of these shared meals, but this time with a few friends, as the caption in the cookbook indicates. Above the table where the meal is well under way, the naturalized heads of the slaughtered animals perch over the scene: calf, pig, lamb, chicken, duck and hare cast their glassy gaze while the guests remain oblivious to them. To treat wild animals as hunting trophies is a common practice, though it is nevertheless

protested. In reserving the same treatment for farm animals, Waldron strikes a different note and foregrounds the atypical practice she claims for herself. In using the same process for all animals and restoring them in a stuffed trophy form, she erases the categorical distinctions between wild and domesticated animals, hunting and slaughtering and above all, between a recreational activity and the production of basic goods.

The slaughtering and meat processing operations that were scrutinized—the transparency of the photographs introduces a troubling parallel with the cutting up of the carcasses—provide images of the artist in action and the artist at work. In Beautiful Creatures, the artist goes to the place where she will be fully put into contact with the production of what ends up on her plate, on what is essential to her life, to the life of her family and her guests. She literally puts a face on the sacrificed lives, those of the animals, and she turns herself into the subject-author of this action whose agents are usually hidden. The artist does not however apply a moral or moralizing approach, but seems more interested in the identity dimension linked to the process. For Waldron, eating is not solely a necessity, as is made evident by her cookbook in which lifestyle and a certain type of gastronomy are the main focus. This cookbook, like the biography that followed, also echoes the craze for this genre of publication that is, in following Giorgio Agamben, an “apparatus” to speak (of) oneself, and which guides the behaviours that shape who we are. One also eats for pleasure, not just to live. It is also in this perspective that the artist represents the relationship to work, using an imagery that, though it may involve necessity, is also to a large extent linked to a quest for self-discovery via an identity forging process.

This is why Beautiful Creatures captures the full execution of the work and not only the final result; the subject, Kim Waldron, is in an apprenticeship, under the watchful eye of the “instructor.” The oversized work clothes reveal her stance, which is a continuation of the preceding series, Working Assumption (2003), the artist’s very first work. During a residency in Paris, over the course of which she had a decisive encounter with Sophie Calle, she approached male strangers in order to take their place at work, wearing their clothes long enough to take a snapshot. The temporary borrowing is suggested by the mimicked polaroid format of the 17 photographs, which by the same token underscore the performative character of identity. The ambitions associated with work establish identity by situating the individual in social and economic categories, as well as those determined by gender. The young Waldron reveals her concern for the future in these roles she deliberately takes on in an awkward way, as though one might refuse her these positions or rather that she could take all of them on without making a particular choice. Seeking to represent the world of work with one’s body also raises the question of her becoming-artist, for whom identity is constructed in the image. The serial mode of many of her works supports this understanding of a decentred subject who is constantly defined by borrowed actions, role-play and processes that are open to otherness.

In 2015, this relatively familiar world of Parisian workers was followed by the exoticism of China. It is in the context of two residencies, in Beijing (Red Gate Residency) and Xiamen (Chinese European Art Center), that the artist created Made in Québec, a series comprising 29 photographs in which she inserted herself wearing a Mao style uniform in various work environments. She started off with the idea of giving of her time over there, in return for the many products supplied to the West via the cheap labour of the Chinese market. The series reveals the access that is granted to a foreign artist who was able to obtain favours from her contacts. Some fields were automatically off limits, or harder to access, since they are filled by men only. The invariance of her uniform once again foregrounds the process; it granted her the ability to play the chameleon by merging with her contexts, but it also underlined her status as a white Westerner, which distinguished her from the other persons. The staged displays show an open China with educational institutions and many manufacturing workshops (metal, moulding workshops and bronze foundry, for instance) which are patronized by western artists. These workshops in fact offer their services in English to international clients who find them on the internet (Xiamen Kangsi Art Limited, XiaMen DingYi Sculpture Co. Ltd). The gamut of services offered responds to various needs ranging from decorative commissions to the

production of contemporary public art works, as their online catalogue reveals. In short, art production is undergoing a delocalization that is similar to the production of other goods.

Through the visual hiatus in the image, Kim Waldron sheds a light on the world of Chinese labour and by the same token reveals an aspect of globalization. As the second economic power in the world, and hence the main rival of the US, China is very much a factor in our lives, the artist appears to be saying. Before being citizens, people work and consume. These are, the works suggest, the main avenues of subjectivation, in a Foucauldian sense, offered by the currently prevalent neoliberal regime. Furthermore, Kim Waldron’s works are increasingly probing the mechanisms of democracy and its inextricable links with the dominant economic system.

Democracy Inc.

Even before venturing into federal politics for the duration of an electoral campaign, citizen Kim Waldron made her voice heard in public space during the 2012 Quebec student strike. She had a letter published in the Montreal Gazette newspaper that was addressed to the then-Quebec Premier Jean Charest, whose government had ordered a drastic raise in tuition rates. The angry student wrote this letter and the artist transformed it into a work. In Même jour_Same Day (2012), she exhibited the original version of her letter translated into French in the simulated context of the Devoir newspaper and alongside it, the reproduction of her publication in the English newspaper, which involved, as the artist explains on her website, accepting that her opinion “be gazettified.” In addition to sharing her personal grievances, criticizing, among other things, the refusal to negotiate and the government’s lies, the artist gathered the front page of six newspapers for the 17th and 23rd of May, 2012, respectively marked by the adoption of the special law: Bill 12 (or Bill 78) limiting the right to protest, and the historic protest march that followed in its wake. In this installation, the artist pointed to the vicious impasse brought about by the government, who she reproached for stirring the tensions by using the media, platforms with clear ideological leanings.

After this foray into a media space to stand up for a political cause, the project Public Office (2014–2016) finally appears as a natural follow-up on Kim Waldron’s career path. In failing to respect the election timetable, i.e. in beginning the campaign one year in advance, the artist immediately turned this approach into an artwork, while also having to combine personal constraints such as reconciling an artistic career, maternity and political engagement. In fact, Waldron was eight months pregnant when she entered politics, a process that she interrupted to carry out her residencies in China, which she was able to orchestrate thanks to a maternity leave and by bringing her whole family with her. It is over there that she commissioned the commercial painter Wang Wei to make painted copies of her political candidate portrait, which was then adapted in photograph form for her election posters. The portrait depicts the silhouette of her advanced pregnancy, an untypical image for a woman in politics. Her process rapidly reveals the major role the image plays in politics, an even crueller dimension for women, who are always less numerous than men in this field and too often identified with or reduced to their appearance. Though her poster presented her status as “Indépendante” (originally in French), she was surprised to see that her official registration—regulated by Federal law—did not provide for a feminine version of the term; in her eyes this was proof of a system that discriminates against women.

Kim Waldron made full use of her body as a pregnant woman, and then of her newborn daughter, as instruments to market her image as a politician. She partook in the show that politicians put on in a democratic system which depends on traditional and social media to function. During her official campaign in the fall of 2015, she participated in television interviews. She also brought back the video Superstar featuring her daughter while they were visiting the Forbidden City, the power symbol of a bygone era. The subjective point of view is that of the baby in her stroller; it shows a sequence shot of a horde of Asian tourists in the process of filming her with their smart phones fighting for space to take a picture of this white child with blond hair. The artist also brought back painted portraits from China that she presented during her campaign in the exhibition La très honorable

Kim Waldron. The title endowed the commissioned production with the official character of court or propaganda portraits, recalling those one often finds in countries under single party rule such as China, or those fancied by Stephen Harper when he was in power and promoted the old symbols of the monarchy.

However, during the 2015 elections, the Harper regime was nearing its end and Justin Trudeau’s victory seemed, for its part, a foregone conclusion. For Kim Waldron, the cynicism that surrounds politics stems, among other things, from the power of the big parties, over which the head undeniably exerts great influence; she/he is the party’s image and imposes discipline on her/his MPs. However, as an “Indépendante,” Kim Waldron presented herself as an autonomous figure convinced that her voice could bring a diversity that the hegemony of established parties does not make audible. Yet it is with this status as an independent candidate, as spelled out on her electoral posters that she opened a space for group portraits in her work. A first portrait took the shape of an election debate organized by the Optica centre and VIVA! Art Action, which allowed her to share a platform with other candidates of her riding in this videotaped event. The facsimile of the official voting ballot on which the names of all the candidates were displayed together, is another visual embodiment of this. The exhibition Public Office testified to the actual insertions of the aspiring politician Kim Waldron into a group she had initially not envisioned joining and whose points of convergence and divergence she also strove to present. On coloured cardboard posters mounted in the FOFA gallery window, she compiled the budget data pertaining to the campaign of each of the candidates, including their election results. The juxtaposed columns of figures invited comparisons and made the struggles between unequal forces explicit. These hand transcribed figures, presented in red, blue, green, orange and white colour fields formed a visual mosaic that was made visible in public space; a nod to the guerrilla publicity tactics of the New York-based collective Group Material (Dazibaos, 1982), whose political engagement the artist admires.

With Public Office, Kim Waldron’s bodily figure ended up being erased. In its stead she substituted her name on an election ballot, and finally her campaign data. The artist’s body has thus become data. She thereby reveals the foundations of our democracy, the system which is geared at self-perpetuation, and in which politicians do not even bother to really pay heed to the needs of people and rising inequities. In the year that followed Public Office, the Panama Papers affair made the news thanks to an historic information leak that revealed the implication of a 140 personalities in offshore companies. The artist recounts how she was made aware of this by a bubble graph published in The Independent showing that the most highly implicated occupations were from the political field. This link strangely echoed her recently begun project where she had decided to open an offshore company with funding from a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The artist’s singular use of a grant indirectly sheds light on the Canadian government’s laxness regarding tax havens, a situation that the philosopher Alain Deneault has steadfastly denounced. In his book Une escroquerie légalisée [A legalized swindle] (Écosociété, 2016) he, among other things, brilliantly demonstrates how austerity policies are carried out at the expense of the most underprivileged, while wealthy and big corporations have fully legal access to tax havens. The tax earnings to properly maintain public services by adequately funding them escape the government, who thus becomes the devious accomplice of such manoeuvres.

In opening her company Kim Waldron Limited in Hong Kong, the artist put her finger on this tangled web and embarked on another adventure that will, hopefully, allow her to understand the complex mechanisms of what at first seem to be very opaque operations that are reserved for the insiders of the upper classes, thus suggesting bigger hurdles ahead. As in her previous projects, she documents her process, including the authentification certificate that proves the creation of the company in question. The artist’s body is reincarnated in a new legal and administrative entity that will lead to new artworks, spinoff products to be marketed by the company. Already accustomed to being an entrepreneur of herself, Kim Waldron has here found a new direction for her art, which could very well exemplify what the political science professor Wendy Brown has observed in democratic societies of the neoliberal era.

The entrepreneurial form proposed to the subject, which Michel Foucault calls the entrepreneur of the self, is increasingly slipping “towards a form that is profoundly inflected by financialization,” in which the credit and rating agencies of financial capital and the institutions that manage it henceforth govern our lives.

This turn in the artist’s practice promises to be rich in developments, guided by the impetus to take self-representation elsewhere by proposing new forms of subjectivation that no longer require the image of her real body. No image could more eloquently capture this transition than the one that Kim Waldron’s camera recorded in Hong Kong from the tower that houses her company. The surrounding glass buildings display how the transparency of the materials is nothing compared to the opacity of the financial secrets of this world. The image also subtly betrays the presence of the artist, in the fleeting reflection of a movement that leads us back to her and her capacity to reinvent herself.

Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” And Other Essays, Stanford: Meridian, 2009.

Wendy Brown interviewed by Jean-François Bissonnette, “‘Rien n’est jamais achevé’: un entretien avec Wendy Brown sur la subjectivité néolibérale,” Terrains/théories, 6, 2017, at: https://journals.openedition.org/teth/884. Accessed on October 15, 2018. Our translation.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Marie-Ève Charron, Kim Waldron. Made in Québec, Montréal: CIRCA, 2017.

Alain Deneault, Une escroquerie légalisée. Précis sur les « paradis fiscaux », Montréal: Écosociété, 2016.

Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, L’image de l’artiste. Légende, mythe et magie, Paris: Rivages, 1987.

Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, New York and London: Routledge, 1998.

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London and New York: Verso, 2013.

Independant curator and art critic for the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir, the author teaches art history at Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe and lectures at Université du Québec à Montréal, In 2018 she, partenered with her twin sister, agro-economist Isabelle Charron, curated the 6th edition of ORANGE, Contemporary Art Event of Saint-Hyacinthe.