March 10 - April 2, 1994

Girrly Pictures 1
Abigail Child and Julie Zando
Video
Project Room

Curated by Shonagh Adelman
American Artist
Catalogue: Girrly Pictures

MEDIA RELEASE

Girrly Pictures is a series of five exhibitions curated by Shonagh Adelman. The first exhbition of video tapes by Abigail Child and Julie Zando, opens on Thursday March 10 and continues through April 3, 1 994.

Girrly Pictures explores sexuality and aggression. The artists - Julie Zando, Abigail Child, G.B. Jones, Lutz Baker, Sue Williams and Nan Goldin -- use a range of aesthetic and formal techniques to draw out the intersection of power and sexuality. The first exhibition features Julie Zando's most recent videotape, Uh,Oh! (1994) and two films by Abigail Child, Mayhem (1987) and Covert Action (1984). In all three works, seduction is a site of pleasure, danger and potential loss.

Uh,Oh! is a love story that takes the classic text, The Story of O, as its point of departure. An all female cast of cowboys stage sadomasochistic rituals in the basement of a diner. The waitress, Oh, played by Emanuela Villorini, falls in love with a cowboy, played by poet, Eileen Myles. Their ensuing love story is inflected by sexual and spiritual submission. The tape, like the novel, suggests that submission is the ultimate expression of romantic love and that this love generates a dangerous loss of ego which, in turn, evolves into spiritual ecstasy.

Covert Action and Mayhem are parts four and six in a seven part "detachable" series entitled Is This What You Were Born For? Child describes part four of this series as an examination of "the erotic behind the social." Restaging the apparently innocuous gestures found in early silent film and home movie footage, Covert Action uses montage and repetition to string together a history without the story --a history sedemented in "fragments of memory" and preserved in the home movie archive. Inspired by de Sade's Justine, Mayhem uses conventions of film noir to reveal the workings of narrative suspense and pleasure. Key lighting, dramatic sound and other film noir motifs of conjure the well worn chain of events--erotic and violent--and then confound expectations.

Su Freidrich
Girrly Pictures 2
Video

Curated by Shonagh Adelman
American Artist
Catalogue: Girrly Pictures

Lorna Boschman and Kiss + Tell
Girrly Pictures 3
Video
Project Room

Curated by Shonagh Adelman
Canadian Artists
Catalogue: Girrly Pictures

Lutz Bacher
Girrly Pictures 4
Photo-based Work

Curated by Shonagh Adelman
American Artist
Catalogue: Girrly Pictures

Girrly Pictures 5
G.B. Jones and A.K. Summers
Drawings and Videotapes
Project Room

Curated by Shonagh Adelman
Canadian and American Artists
Catalogue: Girrly Pictures

MEDlA RELEASE

The fifth exhibition in the "Girrly Pictures" series features A.K. Summers' video installation "Topless, Dickless, Clueless" and a selection of drawings and recent video by G.B. Jones, "The Yo Yo Gang".

Toronto artist G.B. Jones' drawings have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe. However, with the exception of an exhibition in Xtra magazine's X-Tra Space, in 1989, the only place where Canadian audiences have had the opportunity to see these "Tom Girl" drawings has been through the homocore zine scene, in particular, J.D.'s co-founded and co-edited by Jones and Bruce la Bruce. This is the first "home town" gallery exhibit of Jone's drawings. Having accrued the title "Jack-of all-punk-trades"--zine producer, visual artist, video and fllmmaker -- she is also band Fifth Column's self appointed "dyke from hell."

Jones' 1992 video, "The Yo Yo Gang", stars a girl-gang who use yo-yos for entertainment and self-defense. Likewise, her drawings, many of them directly modeled on those of gay male pornographer Tom of Finland, depict the irreverence of punk crossed with homo subculture. Employing punk and SM narrative motifs -- leather, uniforms, motorcycles and prison scenes -- these awkwardly rendered drawings of Iesbian sex in public places refashion erotic scenarios generally associated with gay male culture situating Jone's work within the "sex radical" camp of current feminist sex debates.

Similarly, butch/femme role playing, SM scenes and sex toys populate A.K. Summers' black and white graphic animation. "Topless, Dickless, Clueless" borrows from characters Summers has developed in her comic strips, self published as a series of small format books titled "Negativa". The main character, "a bald-headed butch top libra," in hot pursuit of her femme counterpart, through lesbian bars, psychedelic backdrops and cityscapes, unwittingly falls into the lair of a telemarketing campaign out to conquer the "last frontier" -- pussylickers. Playing with a range of ironies, Summers' comic animation uses repetition and conventional cartoon sound motifs to spoof subcultural dyke life, satirizing dichotomies and inverting the constitution of absences (negativa)--topless, dickless, clueless.

Given the controversial place of power play within sexual fantasy in feminist discussions of sexuality and the current heightened juridical stakes of this pairing of sex and power-- following on the heels of the Eli Langer trial and the demise of the exhibition of Lutz Bacher's work, during the on-going Little Sisters trial in Vancouver--this work presents a timely and poignant challenge to social and aesthetic conventions.

Catalogue Text:

Girrly Pictures
essay by Shonagh Adelman

Published by Mercer Union, 1994

Girrly Pictures features an irreverent breed of feminist art practice fuelled by twenty years of political activism and discourse. Within the current contradictory climate of simultaneous sociopolitical transformation and back-lash, contemporary mainstream culture depicts dykes as chic and bad girls as good (or at least those who make good). Meanwhile, gay bashing is rampant and we are still eons away from decriminalisation of the sex trade industry. Girrly Pictures came out of a desire to exhibit contemporary feminist work which isn't just in your face but sits on your face. A far cry from sugar and spice - disdainful of or indifferent to normative femininity and to the fear of turning men off, of being too bitchy - the aggressive tone of this work takes niceness out of the equation. These girls will be girrls.

While this prevailing interest in the relationship between sex and power hit its power stride in the mid 80s and continues to flood the publishing market, Hollywood and MTV, it has only recently gained some cachet within the hallowed halls of high art institutions - illustrated by the exhibitions, Bad Girls/Bad Girls West curated by Marcia Tucker and Marcia Tanner, mounted in 1994 at the New Museum and UCLA's Wight Art Gallery and the ICA exhibition in London also called Bad Girls. Typically the term bad girl connotes sexual misbehaviour - sluts and whores, vamps and tramps. Occupying an active sexual role (whether work or play) the bad girl appropriates power.

As Tucker explains in catalogue essay, the American Bad Girls show brought together a range of feminist art which uses humour and goes "too far." The controversial response to the exhibitions and particularly their titles points to the difficulty of using humour and hyperbole within a political context and of reappropriating the term "bad girl." The exhibitions' title and humorous premise were viewed by some critics as a co-option and trivialisation of feminist art. Taking on a bad girl persona is a complex position now, since it is so quickly defanged and commodified. Bad is good as long as it can be confined (as it is in the sex trade industry) or assimilated (as it is in Hollywood depictions of sex trade workers) - as long as it is titillating and not too threatening; e.g., at the end of Basic Instinct Sharon Stone opts for heterosexuality and drops the ice pick. Ubiquitous colonisation has effectively stripped the "bad girl" of irony and generally conjured up something along the lines of naughty but nice.

It comes as no surprise that a real bad girl like Eileen Wurnos, dubbed the first woman serial killer, is worth more (to the entertainment industry) dead than alive. While the demise of one bad girl is eagerly awaited by culture vultures, other bad girls are implicated in the incitement of violence against women including themselves. For instance, on of the (presumably male) respondents to Kiss N' Tell's earlier interactive photo series Drawing the Line wrote "I feel the need to rape some girls." Kiss N' Tell along with other artists in this series haven't balked at the prospect of prurient or more pernicious responses to their work. They start from a position which overrides any squeamishness around the depiction of explicit sex and power play.

The controversial conference at Barnard College in 19982, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality," marked an ideological split cast as the "sex wars" which hinged on a resistance to and rebellion against 1970s lesbian feminist orthodoxy. The ensuing debates revolved around the question of whether S/M (and to a lesser extent butch/femme and lesbian porn) duplicates or plays with oppressive power inequities. Although the 'radical sex' camp made forceful arguments against its detractors based on the consentuality of sex/gender power play, these arguments have tended to fall into some of the over determined assumptions they purport to critique - for instance, that S/M offers a libertarian promise of transcendence from sexual repression. Sex radicals, backed up against the wall by political imperatives, may have felt impelled to legitimate their sexual desires on ontological grounds which assume a self-determining, autonomous sexual subject.

The investigation of sex and power in the pictorial realm is important because of its dialogical possibility. While there are certainly examples of images which are anchored within a didactic frame, the work in Girrly Pictures makes no claim to "the truth about sexuality" and therefore evades a direct or percriptive correlation between political and psycho-sexual imaginaries. Although not all of the artists in this series of exhibitions are explicitly or even remotely aligned with a 'radical sex' perspective, they all employ a discursive approach using various aesthetic means to dramatise the impact of technologies of power on sexuality.

Kiss N' Tell's 1992 videotape True Inversions examines the way in which sexuality is mediated by personal histories and by political, moral and educational institutions. Sex scenes are intercepted by a range of captions which use key words - masturbation, unsafe sex and censorship - to signify a diversity of meaning and perspectives. For instance, the caption "uncensored" qualified by an addendum - the criminal code section, "unsafe sex," "politically incorrect" - point to the regulation and complexity of the discursive field in which images of sex are made and looked at. The images are also periodically disrupted by keyed-in commentaries from the director and crew members who are identified by name and position. This device foregrounds a personal perspective which displaces the standard mode of anonymous, authoritative commentary. It also establishes the video production itself as an amalgamation of multiple points of view. In the same way that the crew's inverted appearance in front of the camera undermines the illusionistic form of linear narration, fictional lovers are juxtaposed with real lovers who differ about the prospect of having sex in front of a camera. Keyed into the scene, the director questions the assumed speciousness of sex between the long-term on-camera-only lovers in contrast to sex between the recently coupled real lovers. True inversions uses Brectian and video art strategies to situate sex and images of sex within a pleasurable and contested field of vision.

G.B. Jones' work, explicitly employing a 'radical sex' vernacular, represents sex/power play as an aspect of subcultural lifestyle. Jones' super 8 film, The Yo Yo Gang (1992), is an out-of-sync potpourri of hand-held camera shots, zooms and jump cuts organised around the activities of a girl-gang who play and make war with yo-yos. Drawing on a West Side Story parable of gang combat, Jones' campy home-movie-come-experimental-aesthetic collapses art and real life, fantasy and lifestyle. Similarly, her drawings, many of them directly modelled on those of Tom of Finland, display a "homocore" taxonomy of punk and S/M motifs - tattoos, leather, uniforms, chopper chicks and prison scenes. The home-brewed anarchism of Jones' aesthetic boosts the transgressive status if the content targeting conventions of art etiquette as much as social and political decorum.

Likewise, sex toys, bondage and discipline scenes as well as butch/femme role-playing populate A.K. Summers' black and white animation, Topless, Dickless and Clueless (1994). The association of power with masculinity is inverted in Summers' tape. Although the self-identified bald-headed butch top Libra is in hot pursuit of a futuristic femme, who continually eludes her, the femme is revealed as an undercover agent who eventually capture the protagonist, ties her up and tortures her by penetrating her pussy with extra-long fingernails. Playing with a range of ironies, Summers' comic animation uses repetition and conventional cartoon sound motifs to spoof subcultural dyke life and satirise stereotypical dichotomies: butch/femme, clued-in/clueless, top/bottom (topped/topless).

Using narrated text from the classic porn novel, The Story of O, Julie Zando's videotape, Uh, Oh! (1994(, similarly takes up the rubic of 'radical sex' recasting the narrative of sexual submission in butch/femme terms. Contrary to Summers' videotape, Uh, Oh! exaggerates the stereotypical correlation of butch/femme with conventional heterosexual power dynamics by retaining the names used in the original novel, casting O as a waitress in a roadside diner and Sir Stephen as a cowboy and using a man's voice for Sir Stephen's narration. Lesbian S/M dungeon scenes are intercut with airplane safety demonstrations invoking the importance of consent, suspense and trepidation in S/M practice. Like the title of the videotape, images of risk and peril - amusement park rides and O's account of a recurring dream in which she is in an airplane on the verge of crashing - metaphorically illustrate the pleasure accrued from danger in masochistic fantasy. As in The Story of O, the ego-loss associated with masochism is portrayed as a euphoric experience symbolised at the end of the videotape by the image of a roller coaster ride shot from a subjective perspective accompanied by O's description of free-falling.

While Zando represents the dynamics of sexual domination and submission as "the ultimate expression of romantic love," Su Friedrich's film, Rules of the Road (1993), tells a classically romantic tale of emotional obsession. In contrast to the trajectory of ego-loss in Uh, Oh, Riles of the Road recounts the familiar experience of emotional loss prompted by the dissolution of a relationship. Longing is represented by the off-screen narrator's fixation on "a sensible family car" - a 1983 beige Oldsmobile Cutlass cruiser with a luggage rack and fake wood siding. The stark image of a pair of hands playing solitaire punctuates the camera's fetishistic perusal of the endless gamut old station wagons. Provoking ecological concerns, memories of family outings and reflections on instilled puritanical values, the station wagon becomes a Mobius strip of associations. Recalling the vehicle's genesis within the relationship, its absorbion of cigarette smoke as well as good and bad memories, the solitary narrator muses over the car's symbolic association with a coupled past and future. The camera lingers over lurid detailing, while the narrator attests to the car's deceptive appearance, fondly itemises its comfortable and efficient attributes. Glibly recollecting her disappointment with the car's homeliness she professes that she was "consoled by the thought that it was unique." And yet, the subject gaze of the camera, mimicking her vision, is over-populated with '83 Oldsmobile wagons with fake wood siding. Anticipating the anguish of catching a glimpse of her ex-lover in the driver's seat, she resists looking but finds her nemesis unavoidable. Ironically, perpetually frozen in her tracks by the procession of sensible family cars, she is constantly on the alert for the signature license plate, just as O, chained to the door frame, waits in rapt agony for the return of her cowboy. The car, its simultaneous elusiveness and prevalence, personifies the fusion of pleasure and pain provoked by longing.

Abigail Child's two films, Mayhem (1987) and Covert Action (1984), dislodge and magnify undercurrents of seduction in social and cinematic narratives. Using found home-movie footage from the 50's of kissing, romping and various kinds of frenetic interaction, Mayhem restages "fragments of memory." Montage, repetition, abridged voice-over and cryptic silent movie-style inter titles creates a disjunctive barrage of peripheral moments without the adhesive continuity of a story. As one of the inter titles professes, "My goal is to disarm my movie." Similarly, disarming both movie and spectator, Covert Action employs conventions of film noir to reveal and confound mechanisms of narrative pleasure and suspense. Recurring close-ups of women expressing apprehension, dread and panic, images of men walking/stalking and scenes of obviously stages sexual violence augmented by key lighting, dramatic sound and camera angles propel a familiar erotic and violent chain of events, The momentum of suspense is continually disrupted by match cuts, unexpected montage and auto-narrate sound bites. The gendered division of roles - female victim/ male aggressor - is inverted near the end of the film with the introduction of a vintage Japanese porn clip of two women having sex. During their frolic, a spying thief is caught, held at gunpoint and force to comply to their sexual demands. Although no doubt originally intended to cater to male fantasy, in this context, the scene explodes any singular or fixed meaning. Drawing analogies among the screen, the street and the bedroom, Covert Action manifests parallel and contradictory messages about sex and violence. Evolving a cinematic language based on repetition and metonymy, Child's work scrutinising the paradoxical and repressed aspects of iconographic conventions.

Lutz Bacher's work, surveyed in the compilation tape which takes its title from Susan Sontag's text, "On Photography", investigates the latent connotations of notorious events circulated through printed or televised mass media (William Kennedy Smith's rape testimony, Jackie Onassis allegedly fleeing from paparazzo Ron Gallela, an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald, Jimi Hendrix destroying a guitar on-stage). Bacher's 1986 Sex With Strangers, draws on a more obscure genre of circulated images, is a series of large scale black and white appropriation of simulated rape and oral sex imagery. The images are taken from a 1970s book which poses ambiguously as a sociological text. Though the images look like conventional porn, the original cations included in the appropriations situate them within the pseudo-pedagogical framework. While signalling that this framework provides a pretext for the circulation of "dirty pictures." Bacher's work also critically draws attention to the moral and cultural binding of sex with intimacy. Turning on the motif of estrangement, Sex With Strangers marks the axis of pleasure/danger both as end-points and as parallel conditions of possibility. Without the provision of ballast, the viewer is put in a position which mimics the condition of estrangement. Like the women in the images, the viewer becomes involved with a stranger - the work.

All of the work in Girrly Pictures operates in relation to a narrative structure, whether deconstructing or reconstructing familiar plot-lines or working against the linearity or semiotic implications of conventional story telling. The title, Girrly Pictures, conjures the image of a pin-up and injects it with am aggressive and ironic nuance. It plays on the ambiguity around whether the girl makes the picture or the picture makes the girl. While the term girly typically conveys a softcore pornographic image of a woman made for a heterosexual male gaze, the work in this series reframes the picture without denying the endemic effect of patriarchal and heterosexualist power structures. Instead of dismissing or reessentialising the dichotomy - male/ subject/ gaze: female/ object/ picture - this work recasts the eroticization of power as a political, aesthetic, dangerous and pleasurable venture. Confounding the dichotomy, women are aggressive, angry, obsessive, masochistic, sadistic, pining, seductive, apprehensive; they are also smutty subjects/ objects of representation. Taking psycho-sexual dynamics within narrative as a point of departure, the work engages a mobility and interchange of subject positions. The diversity of perspectives and aesthetic practises illustrates a spectrum of approaches to the problem of integrating feminist theory and practise and to the red herring which continues to propagate an uneasy alliance between political and aesthetic concerns.

This catalogue is published in conjunction with Girrly Pictures, a series of five exhibitions curated by guest curator Shonagh Adelman and coordinated by Mercer Union

G.B. Jones' Feminist Home Invasion

Jane Farrow
Fuse Magazine, 1994

This past November, Toronto's Mercer Union featured the pencil drawings of G.B. Jones, local punk-D.l.Y. queen and all-round iconoclast. Curated by Shonagh Adelman, the exhibit was the fifth in a series entitled "Girrly Pictures" and also includedJones' 1992 Super-8 classic "The Yo Yo Gang."

Seeing G.B. Jones' work on display in an art gallery is like finding a well thumbed Penthouse catalogued and shelved at the Library of Congress. The juxtaposition of her snarky, punker-dyke subjects against virginal white walls, varnished floors and full-spectrum lighting resonates with a charming ambivalence and absurdity.

Jones' series of pencil drawings feature female troublemakers committing acts of sexual misbehaviour. The first is a cruisy tattoo scene between surly biker babes and the second an SM prison fantasy between two inmates and a guard who gets fucked and beat on by her captives. G.B. Jones' drawings are not likely to be in Ms. magazine's arts and culture section in the next two or three hundred years. To understand Jones' subjects and representational strategy one must first acknowledle her blatant appropriation of Tom of Finland's hyper fetishized gay male porn. Tom is the uncontested "father" of the modern homo-clone aesthetic. His realistic, cartoon like representations of hard-bodied (and almost always) white men are widely available and displayed throughout the Western queer-boy stratosphere. His slick, stylized drawings embrace a coarse, hierarchical plaxis of top and bottom, getting and giving. A host of horny cowboys, cops, sailors, leather boys, mechanics and construction workers suck and fuck their way to a heady climax in the boiler rooms, bars and workshops of a sweaty, macho man's world.

Technically, G.B. Jones' renderings are a bit more crude and a little less exag gerated than Tom's. Her subject matter parallels his but with several signihcant departures. Jones' models are rarely authority hgures--they are rebels and outcasts, female deviants (gay/bi/straight/ who cares) playing out forbidden sexual roles on the margins. It is worth noting that the roles of top and bottom or butcl and femme do not conflate with extemal norms of authority and power. In fact, these roles are inversely empowered in the role-playing depicted. For instance, in the sequence involvinK the prison guard and the two inmates, it is the guard who gcts fucked and beaten by the pris oners. This is a critical variance from Tom's drawings, which constantly repro duce and uphold conventional roles of authority and hicrarchy within sexual practice. Tom's cops and captains are, and always will be, compulsively "greek active." The punker dykes of Jones' drawings are refugees from the established moral and gender order. Unlike Tom's subjects, they are not members of the military or police force and do not wield state-sponsored authority. G.B. Jones' pencil drawings are a radical reconfiguration of Tom of Finland's pornographic language of desire. Her out right hijacking of his craft "steals" the language of the "father" a feminist stratagy she furthers by conducting a full scale home invasion on the Great Mother (the iconized Andrea Dworkin) when she graphically depicts taboo sex and power roles between women.

Of course, radical sex does not necessarily equal radical politics -- playing with power in the bedroom does not automatically entail sharing it in the kitchen or on the streets. And we also know that girls and boys are equally susceptible to this revolutionary lunch bag let down. Nevertheless, G.B. Jones' clever inversion of Tom of Finland's lusty gay male porn is radical and transgressive as a representational strategy. Jones' studly, dyke-punk outcasts will always be getting more bang for their sex-radical buck than Tom's father-fucking sailor boys rubbing each other's power-inscribed dicks on the poop deck.

Jane Farrow recently relocated to Toronto after five years living in Vancouver and Halifax and currently pursues two-thirds of a life as an aspiring, unnameable something.

TITS, TATS AND TESTES
A critique of Yo-Yo Gang and Dyke City

Jane Farrow
Fireweed 1994

After living in Vancouver for three years, returning to my home town of Toronto felt like coming back to a city gone lezzie. Dyke content is seemingly rampant, available across the city in solo and group shows, cabarets, exhibits, screenings and so on. Torontonians really are a bit spoiled. And that brings us to the doorstep of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre for a look at Sonja Mills' play Dyke City and Mercer Union for GB Jones' super-8 film, Yo-Yo Gang and her pencil drawings. Both these artists employ humour and trashy do-it-yourself aesthetic choices to convey their own distinct takes on contemporary dyke existence.

Dyke City is a cabaret style, comedic rumination on what it means to be a love and sex-obsessed dyke or, shall we say, a woman who sleeps mostly with women and sometimes with men. Francis is the stereotypic full-figured, loud-mouth butch, sex mad on the outside, but a hopeful romantic on the inside. Madeline is her current love interest, a fuck-anything-that-moves bisexual who doesn't want anyone's rings on her fingers. Jane is the devoted, vulnerable neurotic who gets run over by women like Madeline and Francis in her search for the final U Haul-packing dinner date. The characters muse about loneliness, conquest, fast-food, loss, jealousy, dildos, isolation, fidelity, hydro-dykes, possessiveness and revenge.

Don't look for delicate characterizations and spectacular plot development here. Dyke City uses blunt objects to make blunt points. Its message is simple: women love and lust after women. Its strategy is time-worn but trusty: reclaim women's birthright to be sexually vulgar and unrefined. And its craft is pure postmodern: three-stooges-lezzie sitcom.

However conventional the scenario, Sonja Mills does have a gift for writing tight, zippy dialogue. Like some deranged professor stuck in the basement of the sperm bank, she has spawned the Frankenstein of contemporary Canadian dyke drama. Mixing the overripe eggs of Camille Paglia with the brain-dead seed of Rodney Dangerfield, Dr. Millzzz has come up with the most politically incorrect dialogue this side of"Married with Children": You would suck my cock for bus fare and we both know it or The fucking dykes in this city are getting crazier and stupider. It's all this inbreeding or I'm an old fashioned girl I like a babe sitting right on my face.

Dyke City is politically anchored to the unadorned pronouncement that the words "she's a babe" mean different things when spoken by a woman and by a man. This strategy holds that a woman cannot be "sexist" with other women since she is merely exploring sexual identity and relations on a level playing field. Being rude and bawdy in this context then becomes a means of reclaiming women's sexual power, sensuality and randiness. Dyke City advances this ongoing liberationist approach: we started out saying l'n~ a bad girl and have now graduated to I'm a mother-fucking, cock-sucking, babe-plowing bitch.

Credit is due to Mills for successfully avoiding the trap of prescribing "good" or"bad" sexual behaviour. Regardless of what she may have written or implied in her infamous Xtra! columns on bisexuality and dyke identity, Mills is clearly stating that women can and should fuck whoever and whatever they want. She would merely quibble over the labels we use, preferring "bisexual" for those who mingle bushels with baskets. I maintain that all these labels are limiting at best, preferring instead to plant myself firmly in the "who cares and why are you asking anyway" camp. The mythic Lesbian Lodge has never meant as much to me as membership in a larger community of misfits, freaks and outlaws. Beyond the elementary bond of sexually desiring women, I have nothing in common with a lesbian who wants to be a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

Dyke City is horny, obnoxious and in-your-face rude. Not the standard entertainment choice for a "politically conscious" queer-girl. So why do I find this play so funny and entertaining? I believe I owe it to myself and the play's actors and creators to explain my (guilty) pleasure --let's call it feminist gallows humour. I couldn't help but recognize parts of these characters reflected in myself or lots of women I know. The fact is, dykes do objectify each other, they do lust after each other, they do talk about each others bodies, and they don't always get "the girl." In short, like most human beings, dykes can be rude little shits, and that probably won't change. Seeing these three amusing, if mono dimensional, "dyke-o-types" forces us to talk about our ov,vn sexuality and identity issues. Hopefully, with greater clarity.

Despite these achievements, Dyke City could easily push a few more buttons within its chosen genre of sitcom d la cardboard cut-out stereotypes. For insunce, why does Francis, the boisterous butch character have to be a big-boned gal? Likewise, why must the "liberated" Madeline appear to be chained to her Stairmaster and Lean Cuisine? This conventional approach to casting and characterization conveniently avoids any discussion of race or class difference. While these are clearly not the issues Mills wants to be dealing with in Dyke Cit~, it is crucial that she challenge herself as a writer by factoring in these complex issues and realities.

Moving on to the Mercer Union artist-run-centre, GB Jones' super-8 film and pencil drawings were the subject of Shonagh Adelman's fifth and final exhibition of the Girrly Pictures series. Jones' work has been featured in numerous alternative art venues and fanzines, including J.D.'s, the homo-core 'zine she co-founded with Bruce LaBruce. Her work has also been used as album art and gig posters for the band she has played in for years, Fifth Column.

The 15 minute super-8 film, Yo-Yo Gang, was written and directed by Jones in 1992. Its inventive use (and abuse) of filmic technique and style is truly inspired, not to mention sexy and entertaining: I laughed, I cried, I went to the washroom and jerked off.

Watching Yo-Yo Gang gave me the same feeling I get while shopping at Value Village--that ecstatic rush at finding the ultimate polyester sweatpant flairs or an amazing fuzzy paisley pajama top for $1.99! I could almost faint from being so happy and gay. Yo-Yo Gang is a parallel filmic experience . . . it's a chipped Zirconian diamond bought on the Home Shopping Channel, a 540-carat Zsa-Zsa Gabor special that outshines any of the precious, belaboured, big-budget art gems out there. Super-8 is the molotov cocktail of film media and GB sure knows how to mix 'em: rugged camera movement, blurry focus, rapid in-out zooms, jump cuts, out-of-sync sound, saturated and bleached out colours, smudgey edits, turpentine lighting and reckless sound mixing.

The content is equally engaging. A loosely knit narrative involving the misadventures of a bad seed girl gang provides ample space for campy, slice-of-dyke-punk-life posing and strutting. The background activity is frequently more engaging than the actual narrative (duh) including some outrageous and "decorative" uses of gay boys humping and go-go dancing at the girl gang clubhouse. Make out scenes where orientation is, well, let's just say fluid (oops, you're a girl too, oh well) are pulled off with comedic over-acting and wit.

Yo-Yo Gang has immense entertainment value but also breaks important ground in both aesthetic and content departments. It inverts the homophobic and pulpy "girl gang" formula for its own bad-ass dyke needs while setting the pace in low-tech/no-budget filmic chaos. Jones has put together a film that screams "just do it!" -- an eloquent incitement to action and expression. If GB Jones channelled her secret techniques directly into the part of your brain that makes films it would go like this: "Hey girl, just write the story at the breakfast table, shoot some film and splice it together with razor blades and scotch tape."

Jones' series of pencil drawings feature female trouble-makers committing,acts of sexual mis-behaviour. The first is a cruisey tattoo scene between surly biker-babes and the second, an s/m prison fantasy between two inmates and a guard who gets fucked and beat on by her captors. GB Jones' drawings are not likely to be featured in Ms Magazine's arts and culture section in the next two or three hundred years.

Jones has blatantly appropriated Tom of Finland's hyper fetishized gay male porn. As the uncontested "father" of the modern homo-clone aesthetic, his hard-bodied (and almost always) white men actively embrace a coarse, hierarchical praxls of top and bottom, getting and giving. A host of horny cowboys, cops, sailors, leather boys, mechanics and construction workers suck and fuck their way to a heady climax in the boiler rooms, bars and workshops of a sweaty, macho man's world.

GB Jones' renderings parallel Tom of Finland's with several significant departures. Jones' models rarely represent authority figures, they are rebels and outcasts, female deviants (gay/bi/straight/who cares) playing out forbidden sexual roles on the margins. It is worth noting that the roles of top and bottom or butch and femme do not conflate with societal norms of authority and power. In fact, these roles are inversely empowered in the role-playing depicted as in the s/m prison scene.

The punker dykes of Jones' drawings are refugees from the established moral and gender order. Unlike Tom's subjects, they are not members of the military or police force and do not wield state sponsored authority. GB Jones' pencil drawings are a radical reconfiguration of Tom of Finland's pornographic language of desire. She hijacks his craft outright, furthering a feminist strategy of stealing the language of the "father." She goes on to conduct a full-scale hearth invasion on the Great Mother (the iconized Andrea Dworkin, et al) when she graphically depicts taboo sex and power roles between women. And, although radical sex does not necessarily equal radical personal politics, Jones' studly, dyke-punk outcasts will always be getting more bang for their sex radical buck than Tom's father-fucking sailor boys rubbing each other's power-inscribed dicks on the poop deck.

Both GB Jones and Sonja Mills share an intense desire to actively engage their audience in thought and dialogue. Their iconoclastic approaches are not empty "devil's advocate" posturing but clever means of entertaining, humouring and, sometimes, dis-pleasing the viewer. Mills' and Jones' words and images end up serving two important yet distinct goals: in finding and developing their own voices they unavoidably provoke a lot of other people, particularly dykes, to do the same.

Jane Farrow would like to thank Kelly O'Brien for her help in formulating these happy and gay ideas.

Jane Farrow recently moved back to Toronto after five years of living in Halifax and Vancouver. She currently works as the Station Manager at CIUT-FM and contributes occasionally to Fuse and Fireweed and any other mag that begins with an F.