Each of the three volumes comprising The Life of Animals plays off the format of the field guide to examine different aspects of human/animal interaction. Trevor Gould, in Montreal Zoo, resurrects the civic plan to build a complex of zoological habitats across the metropolitan landscape, transforming community greenspace into wildlife habitats. While the city’s dream remains unrealized, Gould’s text and watercolours of flora and fauna from around the world locates the plan’s idealism in the less than innocent realities of colonialism and touristic capitalism. Bill Burns’ How to Help Animals Escape from Degraded Habitats, while ostensibly configured as a survival handbook for endangered species, slyly questions the motives of would-be caregivers as much as it castigates the actions of ecosystem destroyers. The third volume, Mark Vatnsdal’s Animal Handbook, literalizes the theme of “handling” as a form of interspecies contact. A series of images outline a pictography of iconic gestures – hands that hold, present, carry, feed, clamp and care for a number of different animals – with highly ambiguous overtones: Are the hands safeguarding the animals or serving them up for consumption? Are they protecting or imperiling the creatures?

The message of this bookwork collaboration is thus triply articulated: human intentions in regard to animals are deeply conflicted. Even in acts of apparent kindness, defense or altruism lurk the shadows of hubris, self-aggrandizement and the will to power. It is not only, as the saying goes, that animals mirror human interests; animals are continually subject to, and the unwilling product of, humanity’s presumption that it is external and superior to the natural world.

A controversy raged in the press since the announcement in 1992 that a group of women at North Vancouver’s Capilano College were organizing a Vancouver monument dedicated to the fourteen women murdered at L’Ecole Polytechnique. Over a hundred news items were generated before the piece was even installed. The bulk of the fuss seemed directly connected to the proposed inscription:

The fourteen women named here were murdered December 6, 1989, University of Montreal. We, their sisters and brothers, remember and work for a better world. In memory and in grief for all the women murdered by men. For women of all countries, all classes, all ages, all colours.

A Reform MP, several journalists, and numerous letters to newspapers all took umbrage specifically with the words “women murdered by men.”

More than this one aspect, people also debated the favourite topics related to public art: funding, process, location, and the appropriate role of such objects. The Reform MP publicized his move to block a tiny staffing grant while letters fumed that public money should not be spent on art for “special interest groups” such as feminists. Articles evaluated the selection of a site, the civic allowance of the inscription, and the women-only rule for the submissions and the jury. Framing the whole event, the existence of this furor was explained and celebrated because it happened in the name of public art.

Responses implied that the project was a success long before it was produced. After all, just the idea of creating such a monument resulted in the issue of male violence against women receiving bountiful press attention. However, the project committee repeatedly stated that their goal was to commemorate the fourteen women whose names are too easily forgotten and to create a place in Vancouver for contemplation and mourning of violence against women. In 1994 they selected Toronto silversmith Beth Alber’s project, Marker of Change, but had to wait until the full $300,000 budget was raised in order to produce the work. Officially unveiled December 6, 1997, Marker of Change proves its success by subverting the fuss and complaints.

Alber’s design is effective in its simplicity. She subtly alters the components of a traditional monument to work with both the specific subject of the fourteen massacred women and also with the larger notion of a site for collective grief. The piece consists of fourteen benches made of warm, pink, construction-grade, Quebec granite that are arranged within a three-hundred-foot circle. The benches are five-and-a-half feet long and bear the name of one of the students on its inner face. As well, the centre of the top face has a shallow, rough indentation which will fill with Vancouver’s copious rain. Each in a different language, the much discussed dedication appears on the outside face of seven of the benches (with the other seven left blank). A continuous ring of paving bricks, inscribed with dedications and contributors’ names, forms a second, outer circle.

Beyond the specific press controversy, Marker of Change has to respond to the interrogation of the whole notion of monuments. Opponents argued that it was inappropriate for a feminist project to replicate the traditional, permanent monument form. Another line of attack claims that the money for the monument would be better spent on direct aid services because public art is meaningless in today’s society. Supposedly, people ignore this kind of work and therefore it does not affect public consciousness. Yet, if this is true, then why is the project the focus of a virulent, five-year-long debate? One answer lies with looking at the goals for the monument that went unaddressed in the media furor. As Marita Sturken argues in Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), memory establishes life’s continuity, it gives meaning to the present and provides the very core of identity. Different than either personal memory or history, it is cultural memory and cultural identity which is marked through public memorials.

While there has been a justified critique of the “general on a horse” style of public monuments, the stakes shift when the public work memorializes a group or identity absent from such works. The women’s monument committee repeatedly pointed out that a driving force behind the project was their effort to redress the virtual non-existence of public monuments in Vancouver that directly relate to women. Instead of a single sculpture plopped into a park, the arrangement of the fourteen granite benches creates the potential for a gathering place. The circular plan evokes a feminist style of meeting as well as rituals for healing and the indentations for rain water symbolize vessels to collect tears. Alber designed the dimensions and horizontal orientation of the benches to reference the fallen bodies, yet the size and arrangement of the works also invites visitors to sit and to look around at the rest of the site.

[T]he language and world of prayer, the language and world of song, the language and world of labor and everyday life [emerge] from a state of peaceful and moribund equilibrium and [reveal] the speech diversity in each.

I can see in this piece an illustration of the art of dialogism in its diversity, not only because of the obvious analogy of the angel looking at its own reflection and having an internal dialogue with herself, but because she is also disseminating the idea of identity as a shared condition where the self is never whole.

Slippers of Disobedience, composed of a colour photograph, neon, ceramic slippers and wooden bookstands, further emphasizes Hassan’s deconstructive space and the possibility of learning disobedience, a theme the inspiration of which began with the act of her own child’s disobedience and the reference to the manuscript (from the earlier installation The Copyist) that has become a key reference in the three works. The mother and child’s disembodied presence are suggested here by two sets of slippers (one small, the other larger) and two bookstands. The neon represents the flame of a candle held by the reader while trying to decipher, in dim light, the contents of the text, leaving the mark of smoke on the pages of the manuscript.

Simultaneity pervades Hassan’s work, whether she becomes answerable to Boutros, or dissolves herself into the intimacy of the copyist. Whether she thinks of art as a form of departure, or as a bridge between epochs and cultures. Her work makes known the responsibility inherent in carving one’s own space and mapping one’s own geography, and contributes indeed to the notion of artist as cultural agent and active participant of political art practice. A practice where the concepts of pluralism, dialectics and synthesis, are always problematized at each step of the process, and where the meaning of boundaries becomes the open-ended and unfinalizable circumstance of a polyphonic world where multiple voices have their homecoming.