Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe have collaborated for more than six years. Their first projects involved the political and esthetic reclamation of abandoned, decaying buildings in communities in Montreal. The buildings were revived through thematic explorations and installations of sculpture, painting, performance, and theater. In their two-room installation here, they inserted a restless, idiosyncratic collection of natural objects and personal treasures into the comparatively pristine contours of a museum. Fleming and Lapointe’s projects in Montreal required a gritty tenacity, a vision of how art could address the pervasive crisis of psychic and physical abandonment. This installation required them to be pioneers of another kind in order to propose how art could be simultaneously dependent and personal, autonomous and polemical.
Eat Me/Drink Me/Love Me, 1989, examined the pleasures of female sexuality through nonconventional imagery. In their arrangement of both intellectual and emotional data, the artists suggested the structure and passion of women in love, of lesbian communities, and of the feelings of being “other” within the norms and mores of a dominant culture. The generative idea for the piece was a 19th-century poem by Christina Rossetti entitled “Goblin Market.” It is a tempestuous story of temptation, guilt, and redemption through affection, as well as a labyrinthine passage through religious inspiration and homoerotic passion. Entry to the installation was through a double screen door. The portal’s slight construction and sweet, creaking sounds suggested summer-house images. Directly across from the entry were portraits of Rossetti and Emily Dickinson, augmented by exposed veinlike tendrils and other viscera. A bucket of coal beneath the still faces and vulnerable bodies of the two women evoked the interior comforts of hearth and home, just as the additions to the portraits evoked the subjects’ inner lives. Throughout this main room the artists placed their painting-constructions, combining images of insects and small mammals with found objects and remnants. While the scale and tactility of the installation suggested a domestic setting, the individual pieces were like detailed theatrical flats that implied rather than fashioned a new space. The overall feeling was one of modesty, of transience, of the stamina in life’s fragility.
Up a small flight of steps was a thicker, denser passage of the installation. The floor was covered with wooden boards inscribed with a Dickinson text and embedded with small objects; a center section consisted of a tile mosaic of animal figures. Two screens leaned against the wall in one corner. The snarling wolf on one screen seemed ready to spring at the adjacent sketch, which featured an Ingres-inspired figure of a bather made more substantial by the literal addition of a kind of rib cage. The slight sounds of insects and birds created a shrine of rejuvenation in decay.
The piece as a whole combined a curious, highly intimate vision of the phenomenal with a genuine fondness for the history of common, quotidian things. It constituted a unique record, illuminated by the belief that the deposits and dynamics of private lives and natural events share some common condition of endurance and vulnerability. Fleming and Lapointe project a feminist view that finds politics in an essential comprehension of the particulars of the world. They make explicit the power of the personal vision to quell abandonment, to revive collective memories. The slightly musty, meticulous forms here were forceful signs of esthetic and erotic liberty.
—Patricia C. Phillips
