Made in Québec

Nowadays who can ignore the role of China in our daily lives? During his first official visit in 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau notably courted the world’s second-largest economic power. The discussion was less about human rights than about business and commerce, topics more likely to make for warm Sino-Canadian relations. Already a major player in world trade, China may also benefit from the intentions of the newly elected President Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement in order to take the lead in developing its own trade agreements, in an increasingly free-trade driven perspective.¹ Kim Waldron’s new series produced in China should be viewed within this context. Still working with self-representation as an operational mode, the artist pursues her cross-questioning of identity and work while shifting this time towards the field of the globalized economy and internationalization.

In the series Made in Québec, Kim Waldron staged herself in the place of Chinese workers according to a stratagem already explored at the beginning of her practice. In 2003, with Working Assumption, she donned the clothes of workers in Paris² and embodied their posture and gestures in their workplace, for the duration of a pose. Once played by Kim Waldron, these roles, which only men occupied, revealed their propensity to confirm the almost exclusive genre associated with a variety of professions. In addition to widening the gap between her and her models, the young artist’s appearance underlined her ambivalent position as someome who, through her first residency abroad, was really embarking on an artistic career which she seemed at the same time to questionthe nature of. She investigated the world of work with self-representations constantly decentred by her encounters with others that she imitated, thus offering an image of the artist in perpetual construction. Throughout the series, she became an artist performing borrowed jobs; she made them her own by cross dressing and simulating their masculine qualities. “I am capable of learning to do any of these jobs but not as a man,” wrote the artist about the genesis of this series.³

It was perhaps less a question of practicing these jobs than of opting for the critical and revealing operation of cross-dressing. As Judith Butler summarizes, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself…”.⁴ The role-play of the artist, whose theatre is the work practiced, highlighted a form of social and psychic regulation based on the categories of gender. It also exposes an artistic work that is fundamentally heteronomous, making it singularly capable of affirming, as opposed to non-artistic work, its non-productivity, which is an essential distinctive feature. At odds with productive work and economics, Kim Waldron’s approach goes beyond her personal life path to touch on broader issues.

Twelve years later, two other artists’ residencies brought Kim Waldron to China.⁵ She went with the intention of giving her labour power to the male and female workers who ensure the production of goods for western consumers. The artist was not able to meet the typical Chinese worker, this despicably exploited figure. Instead, the series deploys her interventions in the contexts provided by workers who gravitate around the residency or collaborators they suggest from their circle of employees or family members. Straightaway the title, Made in Québec, discloses that the visiting artist can only cast an external, foreign and always situated gaze on the reality she wishes to approach. The elsewhere is glimpsed through the here. In her images, she blends into contexts like a chameleon but indicates her white Western female difference by the recurrence of her presence and of her outfit, a Mao style male costume. Selected as a disguise of neutrality, this archetypal garment at times finds an echo in the setting or in unplanned appearances such as at the dressmaker’s.

Behind the counter of an eatery or in the kitchen of a restaurant, busy in greenhouses or on the move to deliver water, ironing a garment or monitoring the access to a site, Kim Waldron either works alone or surrounded by the indifference of those nearby. The symbolic exchange laid out by the artist at the start, namely to give her time in return for time saved thanks to the goods produced by the world factory that is China, grows in complexity. The reflexivity, i.e. the figure of the artist reflected upon herself, characteristic of Waldron’s work, here incorporates a particular dimension by revealing an entire milieu: a China that welcomes international artists. The staging of the series takes place in educational institutions, such as at Xiamen University Art College Library or, for younger people, at the Xiamen Bindong Primary School and the Jia Yu Preschool Group. Even more frequent in the series are scenes that occur in workshops and in factories,⁶ where manual activities are required, suggesting a closeness to traditional artistic know-how. The presence of metal/bronze casting and foundry workshops reminds us that some Western artists relocate the production of their monumental works to China in order to find expertise, labour and perhaps costs that are unparalleled anywhere else. These workshops offer their services in English to international clients who can find them on the Web (Xiamen Kangsi Art Limited, XiaMen DingYi Sculpture Co., Ltd.). The range of services offered by these suppliers is broad and meets various needs ranging from decorative objects to the production of contemporary public art, as evidenced by their online catalogue.

The manufacturing activities revealed by the artist’s performance serve both the post-Fordist economy of the 21^st century and creativity under the Duchampian paradigm of art in which know-how is sidelined. In discarding the importance of technical skills, the strategy of the readymade helped to free art from the regime of craftsmanship in which the author function is based on the authenticity and uniqueness of the artist’s touch. By removing this dimension, the art object is separated from the artist’s hand and its design becomes delegated and reproducible.⁷ In addition to sharing features with productive work, which it thereby critiques, artistic work facilitates its participation in the economic changes ushered in by the era of globalization. From outsourced manufacturing to marketing by means of communication, major fairs and biennials, art is linked to international circuits and follows the example of the production and commercialization of other goods. The artist ensures his or her nomadism in the same way by participating in residencies and international events.

Precisely because she knows how to work the residencies where her works take shape, Kim Waldron produces nothing here. She pretends to be doing something, according to a postmodernist simulation that consists of using reiteration and e-enactment to deconstruct that which is viewed as natural and taken for granted. In this intercultural space created in the images, she thereby unfastens the positions and values upheld as true. The series, it should be noted, was first shown at the Chinese European Art Center⁸ to a Chinese public, who could thus appreciate an aesthetic dimension of its everyday work that would otherwise be impossible. Occupying, in their turn, the idle viewpoint, the workers are in a sense emancipated through their experience of a “distribution of the sensible” as defined by Jacques Rancière. For the philosopher, this rearrangement of positions is made possible by art, which forms a common front with “politics,” this “activity that reconfigures the sensible cartography within which common objects are defined. [Politics], breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural order’ that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule and being ruled, assigning them to public life or private lives, pinning them down to a certain type of space or time, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying.”⁹

Canadian political institutions were also of interest to Kim Waldron in her project Public Office, which was interrupted by her Chinese residencies. To make her voice heard in a system dominated by established parties, she decided to run as an independent candidate in the Papineau riding in September 2014, and she launched her own campaign for the federal elections that were held in October, 2015. She carried out all the required tasks, such as the opening of an electoral office, the publication of her biography and the collection of signatures to become an official candidate with a program known by the people of her riding.¹⁰ The key point of this pre-campaign? The electoral posters showing Waldron pregnant and, to top it off, striking a regal pose: an unconventional image for a politician. The artist took advantage of her stay in China to have three reproductions of this self-portrait made by the painter Wang Wei. The copies were ordered in the one-party state where official portraits are usually reserved for the dictator and his guard. The artist proves that in China, anything can be bought. This out-dated, official academic style portrait genre was prized by the-then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had ordered multiple portraits of Elizabeth II. While this gesture served to reaffirm his attachment to the British crown, it undoubtedly allowed him to also view himself as a monarch.¹¹

From one leader to another, self-portraits continue to be leveraged. Victory for the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Papineau riding – the artist’s own riding – was known in advance. His strategy was to foster close ties with thepopulation, which he affirms to better represent by way of countless selfies, widely spread even in China. It was a political spectacle, maybe not as crude and misogynistic as the one of Trump in the U.S.A, but still similar in its logic. In her video Superstar (2016), another crossover between her Chinese and Canadian projects, Kim Waldron anticipated the popular enthusiasm for celebrity icons by adopting an edgy strategy. She walked her baby in a stroller across the Forbidden City and became the target of Asian eyes brandishing their indispensable smartphones to takes pictures. They were like an admiring pack while she also pointed her own camera back at them. The circus that resulted from this encounter corresponds to the image of the spectacle offered by politicians when they want to divert attention from issues that really matter for people.

The baby thus becomes the witness of two things. It symbolizes the intricacies of blending the artistic project with the artist’s personal life as a mother, as well as the lengthy process of Kim Waldron’s election campaign,¹² the longest one in Canadian history. The works and documents¹³ resulting from the project Public Office eloquently demonstrate that the media and campaign funding fuel the workings of the electoral system that underpins our democracy. The distance the artist takes from the mandatory models leads to an inexorable observation: the system is such that it perpetuates its own self-preservation, making itself incapable, in terms of social justice, of meeting the needs of the people, from who elected representatives keep moving further and further away.

Public Office and Made in Québec reveal the forces acting on the subjects of “neoliberal governmentality,” which “designates a form of political rationality that subjects all social institutions to the market as the sole guarantor of the ‘truth’,” a phenomenon that the political science professor Wendy Brown calls “de-democratization.”¹⁴ From a Foucauldian perspective, Kim Waldron’s works evoke these new modes of subjugation and the paradox in which the subject comes into being through domination and especially by recognizing that “[resistance] takes shape in the very intimacy of power relations.”¹⁵

Marie-Ève Charron, December 2016

¹ Benjamin Carlson, « La Chine prête à redessiner la carte du commerce mondial », Le Devoir, Saturday and Sunday, November 26 & 27, 2016, p. C1.
² Made up of 17 elements, the series brought together, among other things, portraits of a butcher, attorney, banker, professor, mechanic and a priest.
³ Website of the artist: kimwaldron.com (accessed on November 25, 2016).
⁴ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990 p. 175.
⁵ At the Red Gate Residency (Beijing) and the Chinese European Art Center (Xiamen).
⁶ In a factory such as the ceramics plant shown in number 26, 27 and 28 of the Made in Québec series, the division of labour exists, but not as in a factory where machines and technology structure an inflexible chain aimed at maximizing profit in a highly vertical organization.
⁷ For an analysis of this shift, see John Roberts, “Deskilling, Reskilling and Artistic Labour”, The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, London and New York, Verso, 2007, pp. 81-100.
⁸ The exhibition was held at Xiamen from May 30 to June 20, 2015.
⁹ Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, New York, Continuum, 2010, p. 145.
¹⁰ The exhibition Superstar, which I curated, presented the synthesis of the project at the FOFA Gallery, from September 12 to October 21, 2016.
¹¹ This image was suggested in the cartoons of Aislin (The Gazette) and of Garnotte (Le Devoir).
¹² This strategy of following through an entire process was used in her work Beautiful Creatures (2010-2013) in which Waldron carried out all the steps required to transform animals into cooked meat, beginning from the slaughterhouse to the table, and finally to their taxidermied heads (pork, partridge, duck, rabbit, lamb and beef). The entire project was presented at Oboro (Montréal) in 2013.
¹³ Made up of video clips of the artist’s participation in televised interviews, video recordings of the debate between the Papineau riding candidates, and their financial reports presented in poster form.
¹⁴ Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec., 2006), pp. 690-714.
¹⁵ Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1. La volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 125. (Translation ours)

Kim WALDRON is a Montreal-based visual artist. Her art practice frequently uses self-portraiture as a means of engaging with various contemporary social situations. Active in the local, national, and international scene, she has most recently exhibited work at the Jimei X Arles International Photography Festival (Xiamen), Mains d’Œuvres (Paris), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC) and Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina). She has an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from NSCAD University. She has been awarded artist residencies in Paris, Vienna, Newfoundland, Xiamen and Beijing. In 2013 she was the recipient of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in contemporary Art. Made in Québec is the final instalment of a two-part exhibition made possible by this award.

Independent curator and art critic for Le Devoir, Marie-Ève CHARRON has organized group exhibitions such as Le désordre des choses, (with Thérèse St-Gelais, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2015), Archi-féministes ! (with Marie-Josée Lafortune and Thérèse St-Gelais, OPTICA, 2012-2013) and Au travail (Musée régional de Rimouski, 2010). She has published numerous texts in esse arts + opinions and has contributed essays for books published on the works of artists such as the Fermières Obsédées, Michael Merrill and Anthony Burnham. Since 2004, she has been teaching art history at CEGEP Saint-Hyacinthe and at the Université du Québec in Montréal.

Read La Presse art critic Éric Clément’s review of the exhibition.

Read Montreal Gazette John Pohl’s review of the exhibition.

Read Le Devoir collaborator Nicola Mavrikakis’s review of the exhibition.