Mary Kainer Ramune Luminaire Judith A. Mason COMING OF AGE The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington THE ATTIC Collaborative installation by Ramune Luminaire, Judith A. Mason and Mary Kainer. Mary Kainer Ramune Luminaire Judith A. Mason Coming of Age Essay by Pam Patterson 1 rench feminist Luce Irigaray notes that If Nobody wants to be old. women are to have their own identity, they Germaine Greer must subvert the traditional male symbolic. Coming of Age While speaking primarily to reading and Their work in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, Fwriting, she notes women “writers” must favour fiber, installation, and performance defies many the images and metaphors of fluidity, dynamism, of the traditional modes of art making. The choice polysemy, and plurality. “She associates the of subject matter is unusual, the style is not easily Pam Patterson metaphor of the specular mirror with this defined, and the formal use of media is unconven- feminine representation. The curved surface of tional. the speculum produces a deformed image which Old woman, why are you crying, it is not allowed here. reverses the reflections of masculine discourse. If the world has dubbed you crone, you might as well No one must make any noise… Irigaray writes: … [on] ‘the specular surface [will be one. A. A. Aidoo be] found not the void of nothingness but the Germaine Greer dazzle of multifaceted speleology. A scintillating The figure of the older woman… is treated with loud derision. She is and incandescent concavity’” (Mambrol, 2016). They rebel as active agents against standardiza- usually shown in a coven with other witches, gabbling and cackling tion and as artists, against the predictable, and in incomprehensibly… Coming of Age, as exhibition, acts as a specular as so doing create a generative (com)motion as they well as speculative (as in notional and unpredict- tackle contemporary societal postmodern ambiv- If we are to be well, we must care for ourselves. We must not cast the old able) concave surface which reflects the work of alence and ennui. In postmodernity, writes Harold woman out, but become her more abundantly. If we embrace the idea of three accomplished female multi-media artists, Pearce (1992), “What is reflected is not the outer witch-hood, and turn it into a positive, aggressive, self-defining self-concept we Mary Kainer, Ramune Luminaire, and Judith A. world of nature or the inner world of subjectivity, can exploit the proliferation of aversion imagery to our own advantage… Mason. Here they take up the deeply ambivalent but a complex maze of associated meanings – the social and personal perceptions of aging. Are the mirror’s reflection of itself into infinity. The artist… The old woman who muttered the magic words or collected the moon– senior years a time of completion, reflection, and become[s] a fun-house mirror anonymously paro- drenched herbs was not a cynical manipulator of the credulity of others… serenity, or of impoverishment, loss, and sorrow? dying, simulating, or reproducing images” (p. 249). [these were] women who strove for power over the imagination. Whether glorifying or disparaging, ideas around Germaine Greer aging mirror, and are framed by, many precon- These artists embrace and yet challenge defini- ceptions. Hovering around their 60th years, these tions of the postmodern. While Luminaire satirizes, artists brew a scrappy and complex concoction, as as might a postmodern parodist, the massive they consider age as not only a biological fact, but modernist military sculptural icon by transforming a cultural – and gendered – one. it into a robust dancing woman, the figure takes 2 3 on a life of its own. It engages and then transcends, These artists embody difference in location, histo- The Kikuyu have a saying, “An old goat does not spit the slow accretion of bodily decay. Notes Simone as does much of the work by Kainer and Mason, ries, and experiences. They are travelers who live without a reason.” de Beauvoir (1970/1996), “It is not the organs that contemporary discussions around postmodern their lives, as Ruth Falk notes, “with roots in them- Simone de Beauvoir abruptly lose their powers in the case of illness, ambiguity (as an intellectual activity that attempts selves” (in Debrida, 1982, p. 142). But they are not stress, bereavement or serious misfortune: it is the to subvert outdated binaries) and ambivalence the displaced nomads referred to in the altermod- Mary Kainer’s banner-like whimsical mixed-media build-up which hid their deficiencies that falls to (potentially more complex, but ultimately a dissat- ern of Nicolas Bourriaud (in Ryan, 2009) but rather drawings combine data, collage, biomorphic forms, pieces” (p. 31). isfying emotional response). Is Luminaire’s figure are, as in transmodernism, transborder thinkers. and text. She uses statistics as “objective“ markers at “the dangerous age” – a term used at the turn of The transmodern is understood to be outside of, of aging and subverts objectivity by exploiting im- Kainer’s video-looped projection “Exposed” the last century to refer to the menopause (Greer, and at times divisive to, the ongoing discourse agery in which the body is seen to fragment, twist, speaks not to to burden but rather to exposure. 1991, p. 81)? As the hag-worn trio who await Mac- (and privilege) of modernism. In transmodernism, bend, morph, ache, and cry. The banners address When women managed their own bodies, the dif- beth on the heath, these contemporary art witch- individuals understood to be marginalized, writes a range of health issues for the elderly: dementia, ficulties they encountered were dealt with within es threaten societal structures, tossing starkness, Enrique Dussel (2006), engage in transversal dia- diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, and vision loss. In the female community. “Women were shy of shar- storms, and sensuality into the mix. logue. It is an authentic pluralistic dialogue among them, she confronts the related over-medication ing such matters with strange young men” (Greer, those on the periphery, not originating from, nor for geriatric, oft ill-defined illnesses, and draws 1992, p. 75). Such shyness colludes with a societal We might also mention the Gnaeae, horrible old determined by, mainstream experts. attention to individual experiences of pain and lack of interest in older women. In this video, the women who had only one eye and one tooth deprivation that challenge the formation of exist- women self-identify as artists. They curiously between the three of them and who passed them When you are young everything is about you. As ing societal myths around graceful aging. palm their faces and then suddenly, in a fleeting from hand to hand. you grow older, and are pushed to the margins, you moment of revelation, expose rare and dissimilar Simone de Beauvoir begin to realize that everything is not about you, Alien and troubling organic forms confront expressions. Perhaps, after centuries of witnessing and that is the beginning of freedom. the viewer – as do the tri-figured dendrites in how the female is conditioned into a girlishness Here we move to exhibition-as-babble and reclaim Germaine Greer “Dementia” that point to multi-staged mental called femininity, we can now apprehend mature women’s talk from its derogatory connotations. decay, and to fear. Her accompanying figurative femaleness. No longer the stereotypically-(mis)named quilt- The artists, self-identifying as marginalized by a sculptures, placed on formal white gallery plinths, ing bee buzz, the conversations occurring among youth-dominated culture, speak as cackling older elucidate both pain and prolapse. They twist and An old lady can accept the fact that she may these works are dialogic, emotional, intellectual, women, from the margins. But it is at the mar- reach, achingly passionate in their struggle. occasionally belch or fart. political, personal, and evocative. They are en- gins where danger and opportunities lurk. These Germaine Greer gaged by and through difference. women are adventurers, risk-takers. Such travelers, Her installation is entitled “Body/Burden” and as Julia Kristeva (1991) notes, are those who are will- while it may indicate the many challenges one “Old age is not merely a statistical fact; it is the A weight fell away from her; she flew up to a higher ing to be changed by such activity - to not rest con- might stoically bear in the senior years, it also re- prolongation and the last stage of a… process” perch and cackled a little. tent, but rather engage in a practice that willingly fers to the insidiousness of accumulation – the (de Beauvoir, 1970/1996, p. 11). Writes de Beauvoir, Isak Dinesen makes the familiar strange. load of chemical and environmental toxins and “[T]he individual’s psychic or spiritual life can only 4 5 be understood in the light of his [or her] existential lonely, deranged, wizened, babbling, arthritic, in- sadness, a disconsolate “what is the point?”. Wom- To disbelieve in witches is the greatest of heresies. situation: this situation… also affects… [the] phys- continent, invisible… As with this sculpture, there en can bear the unbearable only so long and our Malleus Maleficarum ical organism. And the converse applies, for [s/]he is often a fleshiness to Luminaire’s figurative work, culture has little tolerance for grief. experiences his [or her] relationship with time dif- as if life itself is pressing against the restraints of The three, as generative makers, combine efforts ferently according to whether his [or her] body is skin and surface. This dancing form dares to con- In her paintings, she reawakens abstract form in an attic installation where the detritus of their more or less impaired…. (p. 9).” front the seemingly fate-directed game not with in an expressive use of colour and imagery. Her creative lives is reformed into seductive heaps of sexual rapaciousness but with passion and joy – a evolving experiences of her familial intimate rela- objects and materials exposed or partially hidden It is this relationship to time that is compellingly deep unnamable energy that subverts.