The Western Front

Skin: The continuous flexible integument forming the usual external covering of an animal body … Anything which resembles skin in nature or use; an outer coat or covering of anything. The Oxford English Dictionary

Kate Craig took up video in the mid-1970s, an historical moment in which the challenges to dominant cultural values mounted during the 1960s intersected with new developments in communications technology and, in the industrialized countries of the West, a period of relative prosperity which accelerated the expansion of consumer culture. Within this juncture, the relationship between artistic pursuits and the larger configurations of social life addressed by the avant gardes of an earlier era once again became a productive field of inquiry. Artists began to explore new areas of activity that engaged with the actions and materials of daily life and undermined the idea of the artist as a singular master heroically struggling with existential dilemmas. In keeping with the largely oppositional focus of these activities, artists also sought out alternate systems for the circulation of their work outside the demands of the commercial market and the legitimating authority of the art museum. In Canada, this impulse contributed to the formation of a loose network of artist-run centres that appeared across the country during the early 1970s. Among these was the Western Front, co-founded in Vancouver by Kate Craig, Eric Metcalfe, Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, Martin Bartlett, Henry Greenhow and Mo Van Nostrand in 1973.

Unlike most artist-run centres, the Western Front was not (and is not) primarily an exhibition space. It functioned more as a laboratory — deliberately distanced from the constraints of mainstream culture for interaction, exchange and the production of new work by a somewhat amorphous company of artists whose sensibilities intersected and overlapped. Their shared interests included a skepticism toward artistic practices that focused on the production of discrete objects, rather than process and performative gesture, and a concern with breaking down the boundaries between art and everyday life. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary aesthetic that emphasized humour, camp, irony and a specifically West Coast sense of decadence, the activities undertaken during the Front’s early years straddled the categorical boundaries of artistic production, encompassing and combining music, literature, performance and correspondence art as well as work with video. Many of these activities — the correspondence projects of Michael Morris’ and Vincent Trasov’s Image Bank, the performances of Dr. Brute (Metcalfe), Lady Brute (Craig), Mr. Peanut (Trasov), Flakey Rosehips (Lewis) and The NY Corres Sponge Dance School — were oriented toward the development of an outward-looking system of communication that could connect like-minded artists in diverse and far-flung locations.

Discussions of early video by artists have tended to focus on its relation to the structure of television and that medium’s dominant position within mass culture. While there is no doubt that television was a point of departure for Craig and other artists working at the Front, their activities through much of the 1970s engaged with more than the regulating influence of the broadcast media. In her examination of the early years at the Western Front, Sharla Sava has pointed out that the rapid expansion of networked systems (telecommunications satellites, for example) during the 1960s and 70s radically transformed concepts of spatial organization, as the planet came to be re-configured within a “murky labyrinthine cloak of high-tech grids.[1] Sava has argued that the Western Front opened its doors at a moment when the culture at large was pervaded with a kind of communications fervour in which “conventional notions of ‘distance’ and ‘time’ were becoming unfixed from their mooring in the real[2] and questions of communication and interaction were becoming increasingly separate from the idea of geographical proximity. She has also pointed out that as the Front artists rejected conventional modes of representation, they picked up on the concept of network as the dominant logic of a culture increasingly pervaded by high-technology. Encoding often arcane references to interconnection into their work, they turned toward a precarious but coherent network consciousness as the underlying impetus for their projects. This emphasis on network allowed the Fronters to overcome the provincial isolation of Vancouver and to attain a level of collective visibility within the international artworld while combining “the banal sophistication and glamour of Hollywood with the intimacy of a bohemian community.[3]

This is not to suggest that the work of Craig and her colleagues took place in a milieu that uncritically valourized technological imperatives. Rather, their activity was set against the proliferation of information and image through the culture industries and enacted a kind of counternetwork oriented toward the investigation of the aesthetic and its relation to lived experience. Through the ironic character of their art and their refusal to provide a specific or definable form for the networking consciousness that ran through their work, the artists at the Front positioned their activity “between the sign of mass-produced culture and its consumable referent in the material world,[4] disrupting processes of symbolic exchange central to the commodification of both imagery and language. Their emphasis on play and festive humour was consciously set against the instrumental logic that became increasingly pervasive as technology penetrated further into daily life, while the arcane character in which much of this activity was veiled suggested the possibility for the creation of image worlds outside the structures of passive reception on which mass culture relies. Within this context, the relatively low cost and accessibility of video seemed to make it an ideal technology through which artists could manipulate the codes of the dominant representational apparatus while extending their otherwise ephemeral performance activity into the network.5 Despite the utopian spirit of their project, Craig and her colleagues did not hold any illusions regarding the potential for transforming the media’s channels of delivery by inserting “alternate” content into the system; unlike many video artists of the time, the public broadcast of her work was never an aspiration for Craig.

While the Front artists’ engagement with the logic of networking drew upon a variety of sources – including the work of Beat writers like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, artists such as Ray Johnson, Daniel Spoerri and General Idea and cultural theorists ranging from Marshall McLuhan to Claude Levi-Strauss — for Kate Craig the most productive interaction was with the work of Robert Filliou.[6] Filliou visited the newly-opened Front in the summer of 1973, where he produced his first work with video, titled Intermedia History, with Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, Vincent Trasov, Gerry Gilbert and Ed Varney. Finding affinities between his own work and the collaborative, interdisciplinary activities taking place in Vancouver, Filliou established a relationship with the Front that brought him back to the city three more times over the following seven years, working closely with Craig during 1977 and 1979 to produce his videos And So On, End So Soon…, Telepathic Music No.7, The Principle of Equivalence Carried to a Series of 5 and Teaching & Learning As Performing Arts Part II.

The anti-preciousness of Filliou’s work, its emphasis on open-ended humour as a radical tool, and his conception of the artist as “metaum[7] for whom the act of experiencing took precedence over the production of objects resonated intensely in an environment in which issues related to “formalism and painting [had been] thrown out.[8] Further, his counter-institutional stance and his conception of research as “the door through which anyone could enter and participate in the creative process[9] echoed the desire for self-empowerment that propelled the formation of the Front specifically and the larger system of artist-run centres in general.

Without setting up an uncomplicated lineage running from the figure of Robert Filliou to the work of Kate Craig, it is worth noting that the highly contemplative, non-instrumental structure of Craig’s video work finds common ground with the resolutely non-utilitarian character of Filliou’s art. In addition, the interest in hybridity and the crossing of cultural boundaries that informs works like Canada Shadows, Ma and Mary Lou recalls Filliou’s intense engagement with Buddhism and his general interest in the interaction between East and West. Perhaps most importantly, Craig’s practice, like Filliou’s, consistently has been grounded in a utopian ethic directed toward the integration of art and daily life as a model through which horizons of possibility can be reconfigured and a social realm based on authentic human interaction, rather than the reifications of mass culture, can be imagined.

The collective, interdisciplinary sensibility characteristic of the Front’s early years is clearly reflected in Craig’s early video work. Her first video, Skins: Lady Brute Presents Her Leopardskin Wardrobe, was produced in collaboration with Hank Bull in 1975. As suggested by its title, the work is related to the role of Lady (Barbara) Brute which Craig had adopted five years earlier as a counterpart to Dr. Brute, the alter ego of her then-husband and fellow artist Eric Metcalfe. The adoption of a constructed persona was one of the key strategies used by artists who participated in the mail-art networks, in order to expand the boundaries of their art and to investigate the social character of identity. The motif associated with the Brutes was the leopard spot – which, along with its fascination as pattern, called up associations with camouflage, sexuality and kitsch—was the perfect paradigm of glamour, power and banality in mass culture.[10] Lady Brute was not an expression of Craig’s “authentic” self, but a vehicle through which to research the link between culture, its fascination with images and the way the self is produced. While the leopard spot allowed the Brutes to caricature the atavistic desires that lurked below the genteel surface of Vancouver society, the motif also allowed Craig to identify with a specifically female culture for whom images of glamour operate simultaneously as a form of social bondage and a potential source of power. As Craig would later point out, Barbara Brute was everywhere:

One of the wonderful things about Lady Brute was that there was a stand-in at every corner. If I wore the leopardskin, it was only to become part of this incredible culture of women who adopted that costume. I was never trying to … push anything that was myself. It was a way of exaggerating something that already existed in the culture. Besides, it’s always fun to put on a costume. The Lady Brutes were definitely image bound. They still are.[11]

During her stint as Lady Brute, Craig assembled an extensive collection of leopard-spotted garments, accessories and knick-knacks, mostly with the assistance of other network artists. This was widely exhibited during the mid-1970s and was usually presented in conjunction with performances by the Brutes. By 1975, Craig had tired of the role. On one hand, as she noted later, it fit too easily with what the Front’s male artists were doing,[12] while on the other the role’s viability was becoming limited, as Metcalfe was in the process of symbolically assassinating Dr. Brute. Skins was produced as a way of laying Lady Brute to rest. As the black and white tape begins we see Craig standing naked in front of a wall of leopard-spotted garments. One by one she models each item and then packs it away into a steamer trunk, apparently for good. The innocence with which Craig presents herself to the camera and her almost adolescent appearance is echoed in the work’s lack of technical sophistication and rudimentary editing. The soundtrack records the comments of Craig and a group of friends (mostly residents of the Front) as they watch the tape for the first time. Their conversation conveys a somewhat tentative knowledge of video technology and notes the stereotypes called up as Craig dons her leopard-spotted jackets, swimsuits, slippers and garter belts: go-go girl, Fredericks of Hollywood illustration or cheesecake model. The tape avoids any sense of documentary, maintaining an arcane atmosphere and implying an almost familial audience made up of individuals who know Lady Brute’s history. In effect, the viewer watches – his or her gaze mediated by the implied presence of the invisible conversants – as the artist’s body confronts the world of commodified imagery in a playful attempt to open up its banal emptiness and allow the self to move outside its regulating influence.

The tactic of role-playing used by Craig and the other artists of the Western Front served to challenge the conventional understanding of the authentic self as interiorized and stable. Implied in the ability to adopt an alter-ego at will typified by Lady Brute, Flakey Rosehips and Mr. Peanut is an understanding of existence predicated on social interaction, locating identity on the plane at which the body and the psyche meet the external world with all of its processes of mediation. Although characters like Lady Brute position the self as “image-bound,” they also hold out the suggestion of a liberating potential in the capacity to freely shift between roles while simultaneously manipulating their signifying codes to meet individual needs.

Craig’s performance of Lady Brute and subsequent projects like Back Up and The Pink Poem can be seen as an attempt to articulate a specifically female subjectivity within the Front’s network consciousness. Craig was acutely conscious of her position as the only woman among the founders of the Front and providing other female artists with the opportunity to work with video technology was an important aspect of her collaborative activity during this time. In addition to figures like Robert Filliou, Clive Robertson and Chip Lord, the artists she worked with during the late 1970s included Marcella Bienvenue, Granada Gazelle, Gathie Falk, Sanja Ivekovic, Patricia Plattner, Susan Britton, Elizabeth Chitty and Margaret Dragu, with whom Craig collaborated to produce Back Up in 1978.

Craig had met Dragu in Toronto in 1975 when the latter assisted the women’s performance group The ‘Ettes, which included Craig, with their choreography. She subsequently invited Dragu to produce a video as artist-in-residence at the Front and their collaboration emerged out of the fluid working situation characteristic of those residencies. Set in the Front and the surrounding neighbourhood, Back Up presents a series of vignettes describing the lifestyles inhabited by a series of female protagonists: middle-class urban renewal advocates, street punks, high society debutantes and working-class domestics. These are intercut with a murder drama that takes place in a private girls’ school and an elegant banquet scene that turns into farcical debauchery. The vignettes weave in and around images and symbols associated with women and the category of the feminine. Back Up occasionally deploys the positive role model strategies often used in 1970s feminist art, but avoids any overriding sense of proscription through its open-ended structure, its humour and presentation of a palette of “modes” that both confirm and challenge the idea of femininity in the urban environment.

For The Pink Poem, an extended performance undertaken to emphasize her departure from Lady Brute, Craig associated herself with the colour pink through the fabrication and accumulation of a pink wardrobe that was used in a series of performances and a video. Despite the connotations it holds now, pink was both unfashionable and politically retrograde in the late 1970s. The use of pink gave Craig some distance from her male colleagues, who “found it abhorrent, which meant they didn’t want to associate with it,[13] while allowing her to slip outside of specific definition. Pink called up traditional conceptions of the feminine, but also suggested the possibilities of masquerade and the potential for turning conventional perceptions to advantage. As Craig later pointed out,

As a woman, why would you associate your self with pink if you had any kind of feminist point of view? It was sort of retro. Pink clothing was extremely useful because it disarmed people…. It is in fact a very calming colour. Especially if I had to go to important meetings I would wear pink. It was a foil. What is a woman in 1978 doing wearing pink?[14]

The artifacts of The Pink Poem included a functional straight jacket that Craig fabricated from pink satin. The alluring surface of the satin belies the jacket’s constraining function and its potential for controlling transgressive behaviour. This served as the central prop in Craig’s video Straight Jacket (1980), which was originally produced as a collaboration exploring lighting effects with Toronto-based performance artist Elizabeth Chitty. In the tape, a fixed camera records the movement of Craig’s body as it struggles with the restraining pink jacket. The illumination of the single light source underscores the jacket’s sensuous surface, while a distressed voice distractedly croons lyrics that reflect conditions of duress and coercion:

Inside out, inside out, the world is inside out
Inside out, inside out, love me inside out
Planet turning in a jacket
Total torture off the rack

Straight Jacket was produced at a moment when the aesthetic stance of the Front was in transition. By the late 1970s it had become apparent that the re-configuration of the artworld and the aestheticization of life that many network artists had hoped for was not possible. On a local level, “the moneyed class regained control of the Vancouver Art Gallery[15] and focus was shifted away from anarchic, interdisciplinary work to more traditional categories of high art. At the same time, the correspondence network of Image Bank was crumbling under the weight of its own success and the impossible volume of “bad mail” that moved through it. As with Dr. and Lady Brute, the roles of Mr. Peanut, Marcel Idea and Flakey Rosehips had largely run their course and been packed away. In response to financial support from the state, artist-run centres formalized their associations and the earlier amorphous conceptions of network that had shaped the Front’s position were displaced by the new concrete form of the Association of National Non-Profit Artist Centres (ANNPAC). Within the Front, “priorities changed as attention turned to programming, administration and maintenance.”[16] As greater emphasis was placed on professionalism and accountability, and as individual careers took on greater significance, the aesthetic predicated on play that had informed so much of the work coming out of the Front began to seem less viable. Emphasis began to shift from interdisciplinary collaboration toward individual practices and the partial rehabilitation of traditional media like painting.

The processes of rationalization which marked the end of the decade engendered a sense of “confusion and disillusionment” for artists like Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov[17] which effected their departure from Vancouver in 1981. Kate Craig, however, had carried much of the administrative load since the Front’s inception and she considered her work as an administrator and facilitator an integral aspect of her practice. For her, the moment was less traumatic. Nonetheless, her work began to shed its playful tone and its underlying implication of an ideal audience made up of network participants who were aware of her art beyond its appearance on the video screen. From the late 1970s on, the emphasis in her videos is shifted from the performance recorded by the camera to her use of the camera as a mediating device. Beginning with Delicate Issue and Clay Cove (both from 1979), Craig began to directly challenge the conventions of realist/narrative structure and overtly engage with the viewer’s processes of identification by displacing perspective through a vocabulary based on an engagement with surface and the accumulation of detail.

Delicate Issue is Craig’s most confrontational work, and has thematic links to feminist video from this time by artists like Martha RosIer (Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977), Elizabeth Chitty (Telling Tales, 1979) and Lisa Steele (Birthday Suit: Scars and Defects, 1974) in which the female body as an object of scrutiny and desire plays a central role. In Delicate Issue, a video camera slowly traverses the artist’s naked body in extreme close-up. The proximity of the camera to the body draws attention to specific details that mark the expanse of skin – hair follicles, freckles, pores, nipple, labia, an eye that suddenly blinks back at the viewer – while often making it impossible to identify which part of the body is being depicted. The visual image is accompanied by the artist’s voice which directly addresses the viewer, asking:

How close can the camera be?
How close do I want to be?
How close do you want to be?
How real do you want me to be?
How much do you want?
How much do I want from you?

Delicate Issue operates in the terrain between attraction and the distance necessary for voyeuristic pleasure. While the female body presented in the video is offered up as an object to the viewer’s gaze, the view of that body, described by the artist as “too close for comfort,” actually serves to de-eroticise the image. Any sense of invisibility or anonymity on the part of the viewer is continually undercut by the female voice which addresses the viewer’s desire to possess through looking while monitoring herself in the process of being watched. This is reiterated further through the sound of a heart beat and deep breathing which echoes the viewer’s own bodily presence and underlines the split between the depicted body and the speaking voice. Although the questions posed to the viewer evoke the possibility of dialogue, the camera continues its relentless scrutiny without regard for the voice or the response of the viewer. In this respect, Delicate Issue sets up an uneasy oscillation between a sense of control and powerlessness that provokes questions about the relationship between image, desire and technology.

For much of the work that followed Delicate Issue—Clay Cove, Ma and Mary Lou—Craig shifted her interest in using the camera as a device to counter the quantifying regulation of an empirical gaze from the body toward the landscape. The earliest of these, Clay Cove, was begun in 1979 when Craig was invited to participate in Videoscape: Newfoundland Edition, an event organized by Elizabeth (Kidd) Brown for the Memorial University Art Gallery, which included artists’ residencies, workshops and screenings. In the video component of Clay Cove, the camera slowly scans across the rock surfaces of the shoreline near the outport that provided the work’s title. The movement of the camera is meditative, suggesting no particular end or purpose. There is no establishing shot, the viewer’s attention is turned away from questions of location toward a consideration of the relation between vision and states of consciousness as suggested through the movement of the camera over the intricate surfaces it depicts. The video is combined with a series of still photographs of the rocky shore and separate audio tracks that relate specifically to the surrounding environment: the sound of water pouring over the shoreline, the fog horn from St. John’s harbour, oral histories of the naming of geographical features and descriptions of food preparation that are intimately linked to local traditions.

For each of its presentations, Clay Cove has been adapted to its specific site. In 1986, it was presented on the thirty-first floor of an unfinished office building (Park Place) in downtown Vancouver as part of the exhibition Luminous Sites. For the exhibition this catalogue documents, its elements have been positioned to interact with the view from the gallery onto the adjacent Georgia Street plaza. Through the reciprocation between the work and its site, the rhythms of daily life in Clay Cove and the histories evoked through colourful place names (Tickle Cove, Dildo Arm) are contrasted with the fake stones of the British Columbia Centennial Fountain—a ludicrous commission of the provincial government, intended to link a pseudo-Celtic mythology to the geography of the West Coast—and the sleek surfaces of the surrounding office towers. In its emphasis on detail and particularity, Clay Cove engages with the rituals that make up much of daily life to affirm the importance of difference and place. Its immediate effect is to call attention to the discrepancies between the urban and rural, the constructed and the natural, the impersonal and the intimate. Whether common threads can be discerned in the relation between the cadences of everyday experience and the larger abstractions of power that run through both Clay Cove and Vancouver is a question left for the viewer to ponder.

Following the completion of Clay Cove, Craig and Hank Bull spent more than a year travelling through Asia, Africa and Europe researching and participating in different forms of performance and music. Shadow plays, especially Balinese shadow plays, were a particular focus for research as Craig and Bull were among the co-founders of The Canada Shadow Players, whose contemporary versions of the shadow play make up the video Canada Shadows which Craig and Bull produced in 1983. This research re-affirmed Craig’s interest in the borders and intersections between Asian and Western cultures, in particular the diversity found within Asian cultures versus the relative homogeneity of mass culture in the West and the non-instrumental character of Buddhist thought versus the logic of Western industrialization. Craig’s most recent and technically ambitious video works, Ma and Mary Lou, directly address these interests.

Shot on super-8 film and later transferred and manipulated on video, Ma (1986) focuses on images of the carved rock at the ancient temple site in Mamallapuram, India, the Tibetan prayer flags at Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim and the Tibetan prayer wheels surrounding the stupa at Swayambhu Hill in Nepal. These are interwoven with visual and audio images of vast flocks of snow geese rising in unison along the delta of the Fraser River and the Scream Machine carnival ride travelling in the form of a knot of infinity at Expo ‘86 in Vancouver. Through these images and the mesmerizing sound track – the synthesized rhythm of chisels on rock at Mamallapuram, the drone of Tibetan horns and the ecstatic screams of the roller coaster’s passengers – Ma evokes different modes of transcendence. The emblems and repetitive gestures of age-old ritual are contrasted with a contemporary desire to move beyond the self through commodified forms of intense sensory experience, raising questions as to how processes of transformation and renewal are played out in relation to daily life.

Mary Lou is a four-channel video work that, in its ideal configuration, is presented on a wall of nine monitors. It incorporates footage shot with a hand-held Hi-8 camera in rural Japan with footage from the Pacific coast in Canada and the U.S. The title of the work is an Americanized version of the name Marie Louise. It refers to Marie Louise Bonaparte, the second wife of Napoleon, who popularized the use of the passepartout—a matte which is traditionally placed around drawings, photographs and other two-dimensional pictures when they are framed, in order to isolate the image from its surroundings.

In Mary Lou, the central area of each video screen is surrounded by a matte-like border. As the work progresses, the imagery shifts between the space of the “picture” and that of the “matte.” The distinction between image and frame is blurred; attention is focused on the surface of the video screens, the movement of the camera across the material surface of the landscape and the process which structures the succession of images. This emphasis on movement and process is echoed in the sense of interconnection evoked by the substances depicted within the work: the raked sands of a temple garden which dissolve into the pattern of ocean waves or the rain splattering into the calm surface of water that, in turn, mirrors the clouds from which the rain falls. Through the blurring of the boundaries that contain the image and the significance attached to movement and interconnection, Mary Lou counters the binary divisions—positive/negative, natural/artificial, inside/outside—that underlie the instrumental logic which shapes mass culture. In this respect, Mary Lou paradoxically acknowledges inhabitation of a technologically-saturated culture, while remaining at odds with technology’s impact on consciousness.

For this exhibition, Craig developed a site-specific sound installation which draws upon the audio tracks of Mary Lou, Ma, Delicate Issue and Clay Cove. As each work is screened, audio is distributed in a specific compositional sequence to locations within the exhibition space and to corner alcoves where windows look out onto the surrounding environment. On one level this operates as a kind of sound path, drawing the viewer through the space and playing off of the relationship between perception and memory, as sound is encountered and re-encountered in different contexts. On another level, the installation serves to amplify the relationship between the spaces of the gallery, the activity of the surrounding urban landscape, and the histories called up in the details and seams in the landscape’s surface. The sound of rushing water from Clay Cove and the pounding heartbeat of Delicate Issue shift, and are shifted by, the view onto the artificial waterfall above Arthur Erickson’s Robson Square or the commuters who wait along Howe Street for transport to the suburbs. Craig’s application of sound imbues the space with a sense of interconnection, linking the physical structure of the gallery to that of the surrounding office towers. At the same time, attention is drawn to the separation between the contemplative character of the gallery and the directed chaos of the street. Like Mary Lou, Craig’s audio installation points toward the paradoxical condition it inhabits. The inflections of this work emphasize a utopian value in the ideal character of the gallery’s contemplative space. They also point toward its institutional condition, the vagaries of its history, and the fact that the conditions that maintain the separation of these spaces from the street are linked to the conditions that maintain the separation of art from daily life and structure social relations on the requirements of production rather than the needs of human interaction.

Notes

1. 1. Sharla Sava, As If The Oceans Were Lemonade: The Performative Vision of Robert Filliou and the Western Front. (MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1996), p.42. My understanding of the Western Front’s early years is indebted to Sava’s written work and also to the conversations we have had over the past few years in which she has generously shared her knowledge of the Front and the Fluxus movement.
2. 2. Sava, p. 8.
3. 3. Sava, p. iii.
4. 4. Sava, p. 64.
5. 5. For a critical discussion of the relation between artistic practices, the imperatives surrounding the use of the Front’s equipment and the structure of liberal bureaucracies, see William Wood, “This is Free Money? The Western Front as Facility,” in Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front. (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993), pp. 179-187.
6. 6. For discussions of the role of network in the work of the Front artists, see Sharla Sava, “As If The Oceans Were Lemonade,” Front Magazine (Vancouver) vol. IX, no. 5, May/ June 1998, pp. 24-27, and “The Filliou Tapes—From Political to Poetical Economy (caught in the word storm of May)” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy. (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, 1995), pp. 16 – 48. Also, Scott Watson, “Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov Archive,” and Keith Wallace, “On the Set at Babyland,” in Hand of the Spirit: Documents of the Seventies from the Morris/Trasov Archive. (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1994), pp. 5 -28 and 29-47.
7. 7. Judy Radul, “What Remains -What Reminds,” in Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front, p. 210.
8. 8. Kate Craig and Hank Bull, “Conversation with over under around about to and for Robert Filliou,” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, p. 62.
9. 9. Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov, “Letter from Berlin,” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, p. 73.
10. 10. See Scott Watson, “Return to Brutopia,” in Return to Brutopia: Eric Metcalfe Work and Collaborations. (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1992), pp. 7-45.
11. 11. Kate Craig in “Personal Perspective 1970-1979” in Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983. (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), pp. 262.
12. 12. Kate Craig, in conversation with the author, 1997.
13. 13. Kate Craig in “Skin: a conversation with Kate Craig, Hank Bull and Sharla Sava,” BOO Magazine (Vancouver) 11, 1998, p. 10.
14. 14. ibid, p.10.
15. 15. Scott Watson, “Hand of the Spirit,” p. 26.
16. 16. Keith Wallace, “On the Set at Babyland,” p. 44.
17. 17. Scott Watson, “Hand of the Spirit,” p. 19.