April 1993
Imogen Grant had never been good at taking criticism. This wasn’t because she was sensitive, or easily offended, or because her confidence would be shaken if someone didn’t like her work. The problem was the opposite. Imogen wasn’t good at taking criticism because she literally wouldn’t take it. Every negative comment about her art went in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t that she didn’t hear it, it was that she didn’t agree or even really care what anyone thought. If the criticism came from someone she respected, she would consider it, but usually came to the conclusion that she didn’t really respect that person as much as she thought she did. It was well-known amongst Imogen’s friends, admirers, critics, and rivals that she had the kind of unshakable—and not unearned—conviction in her own talent that most artists would kill for.
Which is why it came as such a surprise when Professor Caldwell stopped her halfway through her presentation for the Third Year Showcase by slamming her hand down on the table where the adjudicators sat and fixing Imogen with a furious glare.
At that moment, Imogen was halfway through being dragged from the room by the four actors she had hired to play her doctors from the psychiatric ward. It took all of them a moment to realise what was going on: that the performance piece had been interrupted and that Professor Caldwell was shouting at them to “Desist with this travesty at once!”
The doctor-actors set Imogen back on the ground and looked at the professor warily; Imogen wondered if they thought this was a pre-arranged part of the piece. A performance within a performance! But it wasn’t, and she was disoriented as she tried to collect herself and focus on what Caldwell was saying.
“This is not art!” Caldwell was shouting. She was red in the face, her frizzy hair standing up as she pulled her fingers through it. For a brief moment, Imogen felt a tug of satisfaction that her piece had caused such a visceral reaction. Then she registered what her professor was saying, and satisfaction was replaced by anger.
“What do you mean it’s not art?” she demanded. “It’s performance art. We covered Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci last semester and the provocative approaches they took to performance pieces. You called yourself a great admirer of their work!”
“Don’t compare yourself to Oppenheim and Acconci,” Caldwell seethed. “This vulgar display is not the mature and grounded work of those masters.”
“Mature and grounded?!” Imogen bristled with indignation. “Acconci lay under a ramp and masturbated while visitors walked above him.”
“Excuse me…” One of the other adjudicators cleared his throat. “I think Miss Grant has a point about Acconci and performance art in general, Professor Caldwell. Her piece is not more incendiary than, say, Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll.” He shuddered, the thought of a woman retrieving a scroll from inside her vagina and then reading aloud the feminist manifesto written on it clearly too visceral for his delicate sensibilities.
“This—” Caldwell gestured at Imogen, barefoot and dressed in her hospital gown, tears streaming down her face, sick all down her front “—is no Interior Scroll. Schneemann’s work was a commentary on gender and feminism, a potent political message about women’s perceived passivity. This mockery of the form that Miss Grant has shown us today is nothing but a self-indulgent farce by a spoiled little girl with so few real problems that she has to invent them.”
“I didn’t invent this,” Imogen said, blood rushing to her face as anger heated her. “This really happened to me. I was sent to a psychiatric ward at eighteen against my consent. The doctors really had to drag me away like this.”
“Yes, Miss Grant, I am aware,” Caldwell said coolly. “I have read your artist’s statement. But a simple recreation of true events does not art make. What is it trying to say? What is it trying to achieve? Where is the artistic merit?”
“Why does art have to try to achieve anything?” Imogen argued, folding her arms. “Why can’t it just be self expression?”
“And what are you expressing here?” Caldwell raised her eyebrows. “If you had tried to capture the experience through a different medium, perhaps removed your personal involvement and given your viewers a chance to witness the experience objectively, then I might feel differently. But as it is, you are manipulating your viewer into having the emotional reaction you desire, instead of letting the art speak for itself.”
Imogen stared at Caldwell, disbelieving. This piece, this performance, was the culmination of three years of artistic study. She had planned it so minutely, curated it so specifically, trained and practised for dozens of hours. Did Caldwell think it was easy to make herself vomit on cue? Or to get into the mindset of her adolescent suicidal ideation? She’d worked hard to prepare this piece, and everything was perfect, down to the surprise performance. (She had told Caldwell she would be presenting a painting). Surprise was the point: to shock the audience, the way she had been shocked, when her father had told her she was being sent to a psychiatric ward. To evoke the sensation of betrayal, confusion, hurt, and fear she had felt as he’d introduced the strange men on the sitting room couch as doctors.
And by working through those feelings in her art, Imogen also hoped it might heal her; heal the wound that the stint in the psychiatric ward had left behind. But she wasn’t going to tell Caldwell that. The professor would just say that art wasn’t meant to be therapy and that Imogen should be more removed from her work.
“Even if I am manipulating my viewers,” Imogen said finally, “so what? Who says art needs to be objective, to let the viewer come to their own conclusions? I’m the artist. This is my vision. My viewers can feel what I want them to feel, and if they don’t like it, then they can leave.”
But Caldwell didn’t seem to be listening. She was shaking her head, a self-satisfied smirk on her lips. “I’m sorry, Miss Grant, but I can’t allow this piece to be shown in the Third Year Showcase. It’s not just a matter of taste. It’s too disruptive to the other students’ pieces; pieces, I might add, that rely on carefully-refined craft, not shock value.”
“But—” Imogen could barely believe what she was hearing. “The Third Year Showcase is where agents scout for new talent! I have to exhibit!”
“I’m sorry,” Caldwell repeated, although she looked anything but sorry, “but my decision is final.”
As Imogen stormed from the lecture hall, she had to bite back the stream of furious invectives that she longed to throw at Caldwell. The professor was nothing but a jealous, washed-up bitch, she thought furiously. She’d never had an original idea—that’s why she was a teacher, for God’s sake—and she resented Imogen because she was young, vibrant, and going places.
“She’s going to regret this,” she muttered to herself. “She’s going to regret this.”
“Is she, though?” Sebastien asked her the next day, as he sat across from her in their local, The Book End. “Caldwell got exactly what she wanted. She kicked you out of the show, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.”
“Exactly what she wanted?” Jess looked between the two of them, confusion wrinkling her brow. “She wanted Imogen out of the show?”
Sebastien took up a sip of his beer before responding. It was warm in the pub, and Imogen felt a little calmer today, surrounded by the familiar wood panelling and her loyal-to-a-fault friends. Even her new friendship with Jess had proved soothing; Jess was cool and calculating in a way that evened out Imogen’s fiery tirades.
“Caldwell’s been after Imogen since first year,” Sebastien explained to Jess now. “Imogen made a parody of her most famous work that was somewhat… mocking.”
“I wasn’t mocking it,” Imogen cut in, grinning nevertheless at the memory of Caldwell’s face at the unveiling. “I was responding to it. I took issue with her sanitised depiction of motherhood.”
“Caldwell had done a series of photos on giving birth—” Sebastien began, but Imogen interrupted him.
“It was a cowardly capitulation to the male gaze,” she said dismissively. “Women are goddesses, childbirth is beautiful and natural bullshit, which, sure, it can be, but it’s also messy and animalistic.”
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“Which you know because you’ve given birth, have you?” Sebastien rolled his eyes, then turned back to Jess. “Being the expert she is on childbirth, Imogen recreated the same images in a multimedia painting that depicted things a bit messier.”
“The baby was a monster, in my version,” Imogen said with a grin. “And there was blood… everywhere.”
“Her own period blood,” Sebastien added.
Jess snorted into her beer. Wiping foam from her nose, she shook her head at Imogen. “No wonder Caldwell hates you.”
“I admit that work was a bit… unnecessarily personal,” Imogen admitted. She held up her hands in an apologetic gesture. “But I was young and angry. I wanted to disrupt the system, to challenge the academics who acted as gatekeepers to my self-expression. My work is more evolved now, but Caldwell clearly can’t get over it. It’s so petty. I’d be honoured if a student responded to my work like that.”
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t see it as criticism,” Sebastien said. He sighed. “You never see anything as criticism.”
“Surely Caldwell not letting you be in the show is criticism,” Jess pointed out.
“Sure,” Imogen said with a shrug, “but it’s her problem, not mine. The piece is great. She either can’t see that because she’s a blind old bat, or she’s jealous and doesn’t want agents seeing my work at the showcase.”
Jess nodded, her eyes momentarily distant as she grew thoughtful. “Maybe you could hold your own showcase…” she suggested suddenly. “At the same time as the Third Year Showcase. You could upstage her.”
Sebastien’s eyes grew wide. “But Imogen wouldn’t want to draw attention away from the other students.”
“No, but you could tell the other third years that Caldwell is censoring you and invite them to be part of your showcase,” Jess said eagerly. “And you could find a really rad place to host it, like a warehouse or an up-and-coming gallery. Somewhere outside of the ivory tower. You could even invite the agents that were going to be at the Third Year Showcase.”
Jess’s eyes were gleaming with excitement, and Imogen couldn’t help but notice the way Sebastien watched her with admiration. She wondered briefly if they were fucking yet, then forgot about it at once. The image Jess had painted for her was glittering too appealingly in her mind’s eye.
“I can see it…” she said slowly. “A sort of 1960s-esque Happening. The mixing of students, non-students, art professionals, and amateurs. A protest against the elitism of the academy and its bourgeois puritan aesthetics.”
“You could use that warehouse the cannery just vacated,” Sebastien suggested. “My guys in the union could help get you in. They’ve hated the owner ever since he started sending jobs overseas.”
Imogen nodded. “We could invite them, too. Another searing indictment of the ruling class’s taste and politics.”
Sebastien managed not to roll his eyes, but just barely. Imogen wasn’t offended, though. She was never offended. Instead, her mind was whirring with ideas: planning her strategy for how she’d convince the other students to go along with her, designing the space, and imagining the articles that would circulate in the weeks to follow about the daring student art exhibition led by Imogen Grant.
It wasn’t very hard for Imogen to convince her fellow third years to ditch the university-sponsored showcase in favour of her own. Once they heard what had happened, they shared her righteous outrage over Caldwell’s censorship. The art department was small, and all of them had worked with Imogen at one point or another. They knew her as a very serious—if somewhat pompous—artist worthy of being featured in the Third Year Showcase. The only holdout, of course, was Paul Henderson. The university’s darling for his classical style and gentle “critiques” of masculinity, Henderson preferred to show his loyalty to the administration that had given him his own solo show.
Imogen didn’t care. In fact, she thought the show would be better without Henderson. Not only because his art was terrible, but because it would feed the narrative that she and Henderson were rivals. Well, it wasn’t just a narrative; they were rivals. But if the drama of their opposing showcases generated publicity, so much the better.
Everything was going as planned for the showcase: the third year students had created astonishing pieces that Imogen was proud to show her work next to; Sebastien was promoting the event with everyone he knew, and he knew everyone; Alastair and his new band—ridiculously named A-La-Stair—had agreed to play several sets throughout the night; Jess had written a profile of Imogen and the showcase in the Weekly, which it seemed everyone on campus had read; and, best of all, several prominent agents had RSVPed yes. A few had even confided in her how exciting and rebellious it was that she was going behind the university’s back.
It was going to be a success. Imogen knew it. She’d set her mind to something, and now she would succeed. Everything was going to turn out perfectly.
A few days before the showcase, Imogen was working in her campus studio when she was interrupted by a knock. When she opened the door, she found herself face-to-face with Professor Caldwell.
“Miss Grant.” Caldwell frowned as she looked up at Imogen—who, at 5’10’’, was taller than most other women. “May I have a word?”
Imogen hesitated. She’d been in a flow with one of her paintings, but she supposed she should hear what Caldwell had to say. Nodding, she stood aside to let the professor enter.
Caldwell took her time to look around the studio. Her eyes trailed over the large abstract paintings that depicted Imogen, or a version of her, in the hospital gown she’d worn in the psychiatric ward. Caldwell stood for a long time in front of one of these, gazing raptly at it with an intrigued look on her face.
“You know, if this were the piece you’d submitted to the Third Year Showcase, I wouldn’t have rejected you,” she said finally.
Imogen came to stand next to her and looked critically down at the painting. “Maybe I wanted to get kicked out. Maybe that was part of the performance: to shock and disturb the establishment.”
Caldwell sighed. Imogen thought she sounded deeply tired. “You think I don’t understand that urge?”
Imogen snorted. “I know you don’t.”
Caldwell didn’t respond at once. Imogen had just started to feel uncomfortable in the silence when Caldwell said, “You know, when I was making art in the seventies, it was radical to depict childbirth as beautiful. Women were rejecting the medicalised birthing their mothers had been forced into, going out into the forest and birthing their own babies, being one with their bodies. Sure, it wasn’t always easy, but it was liberating. We felt like we were at the forefront of feminism, creating new gender norms and disrupting the male-centric medical establishment. My art reflected that. You might look at it and see something old-fashioned and outdated, but there was a time when my ideas were the avant-garde ones.”
Imogen drummed her fingers against her thigh. “Why are you telling me this?”
Caldwell ran her hand through her hair, then turned to look at her. The two stared at each other. “It happens more quickly than you think,” Caldwell murmured.
Imogen frowned. She wasn’t in the mood for Caldwell’s esoteric musings. “What does?”
But Caldwell didn’t seem to be listening. She was lost in thought, her eyes unfocused as she stared at something over Imogen’s shoulder. After several long moments—during which Imogen contemplated clearing her throat loudly and rather rudely—Caldwell snapped back to herself. Her expression returned to its usual look of lofty disapproval and her eyes narrowed.
“Your work has been reinstated in the Third Year Showcase,” she said. “We kindly ask that you contact the curator as soon as possible to discuss your specific installation needs.”
Caldwell gave her a cold smirk and turned to go. She was almost at the door when Imogen spoke.
“I won’t be at the Showcase.” Caldwell stopped, hand on the door. Imogen couldn’t help but smile as she imagined the look on the professor’s face. “I’m hosting my own showcase with the other third years. One that is free from censorship.”
“Yes,” Caldwell said without turning. “I heard about this.”
“Well then you already knew my answer.”
Caldwell turned. Her eyes were ice as they met Imogen’s. “You can’t do this. The university will take action.”
Imogen laughed and folded her arms. “I’ve read the student handbook cover to cover. The Third Year Showcase isn’t a requirement for graduation, and there’s nothing that says we can’t host our own exhibition. You can’t stop me, and if threatening me is how you think you’ll get me back, you’re gravely mistaken.”
Caldwell’s mouth was a thin line of fury. “You always have to win, don’t you?”
Imogen couldn’t help but smile. “Winning is a foregone conclusion, when you’re the best.”
If Imogen was worried she was overselling herself, then her improvised third year showcase in the former cannery erased all her doubts. Everyone was there. Not just the agents who had been invited, but artists and critics Imogen would never have dared to invite; not out of modesty, but because even she understood that some people were out of art students’ league. There was a queue to get in, and every time Imogen escorted a VIP past it, she knew they were impressed. Her work was happening. She was happening.
A-La-Stair was on fire that night. Everyone was dancing wildly to their music, and when they finished their first set, the audience chanted for more. Alastair waved them away, laughing. “We have another set in fifteen minutes!” he shouted into the mic. “Greedy bastards…”
Which was Imogen’s cue. As Alastair left the stage, the lights in the warehouse went out all at once. Several people gasped. A few screamed. Then a spotlight snapped on, illuminating Imogen where she stood on her mark. Stillness fell over the warehouse. The room’s attention sharpened around her.
A voice boomed out over the loudspeaker: her father’s voice. You’re sick in the head. Her mother’s voice. You need help, sweetie. Help we can’t give you. Her own voice. I don’t want to be here anymore.
And then the performance began.
Later, Imogen would say this was the moment her life really began. The applause that filled her ears after was like the coven’s scream that summons the devil, and she was ready to sign away her soul.
After, as tears still streamed down her cheeks, hands found hers: congratulatory handshakes and cards pressed into her palm by eager agents. Whispers filled her ears: promises of representation, of solo shows, of money and fame and exposure. All the things she dreamed of.
But for once, Imogen wasn’t thinking about any of that. Maybe it was because of how emotionally drained she was after the performance, but the only people she wanted to see were her friends. And there they were: Alastair, jumping down from the stage to hug her; Sebastien—his arm around Jess—shaking his head in wonder as he congratulated her; Jess’s slow, thoughtful smile. And as the three of them hugged her, Imogen realised something she wasn’t expecting: it was this love that healed her, far more than any performance.