Training to Failure
Toronto in the ’70s was a mid-size Protestant town with a penchant for puritanical by-laws (you couldn’t buy a drink on a Sunday unless you were having a sit-down meal), which made it an unlikely home for a thriving artistic community devoted to the emerging practice of conceptual video art. Yet the very fact that the city was a blank slate, in cultural terms, also made it unusually conducive for the fledgling medium. As curator Peggy Gale recalls, Toronto at this time “was being invented by twentysomethings who saw the possibility of a new language of form and movement with no encumbering history and relatively few limitations.” The founding in 1971 of A Space Gallery and Trinity Square Video (both of which still exist today) provided production resources and exhibition spaces for this first generation of video artists who, as per Gale, were “less interested in electronic capabilities than in concepts and sensibilities centred on conceptualism, performance, and issues of the body experienced in new ways.”
At the very centre of this movement was Lisa Steele, the artist, activist, educator, and cultural worker whose five-decade career was recently saluted with a three-night retrospective curated by Chris Kennedy for TIFF’s Wavelengths program. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Steele emigrated to Canada in 1968 with her then husband Chuck Wall, a Vietnam war resister fleeing the draft. After working odd jobs throughout the country, the pair settled in Toronto, where Steele gravitated towards the art world, took up with the group behind consists of a single unbroken shot of Steele standing in front of the camera and attempting to juggle—“attempting” being the key word here, as Steele fails in her self-appointed task, over and over again, for the entirety of the video’s six minutes.
