Rebecca Belmores Tent City

Jessica Mach
In November of 2003, in a studio at what was then the Emily Carr Institute of Art and
Design, Vancouver-based artist Rebecca Belmore performed before a video camera. Trained
on the ground throughout the length of the performance, with Belmores feet dominating
its field of view, the camera comprised the performances sole witness within the studio, its
lens circumscribing a tableau across which Belmores hands moved rapidly, wiping down her
bare feet, laying out slices of bread, ripping open packets of ketchup. The footage was
streamed live, punctuated intermittently by previously recorded footage of a tent city that
had been organized by the local Anti-Poverty Committee at Vancouvers Creekside Park,
and projected into public venues in seven cities across Canada, Europe, China, and Australia
as a contribution to the local debate about the inhabitants of the tent city and the enterprise
in the name of which they had established it.
!e resulting video collage was titled simply Tent City. It constituted Belmores
contribution to a three-day, three-artist show called Chiasma that had been organized by
Vancouvers grunt gallery in collaboration with two organizations in Australia and the
United Kingdom. For Chiasma, each participating artist had developed an original
performance that was presented, as with Tent City, via a live stream. In consideration of
the di"erent time zones of the cities in which the performances were publicly projected,
each work was performed twice, with an interval of several hours in between. Shortly after
the rst showing of Tent City, before Belmore was scheduled to perform for the second
time, the tent city in Creekside Park, which had housed members of Vancouvers homeless
since it had been established in midsummer, was forcibly dismantled by police o#cers and
city workers. A month earlier, the City of Vancouver had prohibited the establishment of
unauthorized structures on city-owned land. !at the introduction of this legislation
was largely motivated, or at least legitimized, by local campaigns that aimed to return
Creekside Park to public use
1
is instructive with regard to the level of dissociation that
existed between the tent citys occupants and the constituency in the interests of which it
UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 3 | 2012
1 Quoted in Karenn Krangle, Ladner calls for bylaw to end squats, Vancouver Sun, October 22, 2003.
Emphasis added.
was dismantled, for it illustrates the way in which the citys homeless failed to register as
fellow members of the public in the latters imagination.
In the live component of Tent City, Belmore methodically spreads both food and
her bare feet across an area covered in mud. I argue that these actions evoke the general
failure of the homeless to achieve what anthropologist Mary Douglas calls dirt-
avoidancethe social obligation to observe a conventional standard of hygiene that
constitutes one of the conditions of membership within any social group. !is failure, a
result of the lack of access that the homeless have to a number of conventional facilities
and resources, accounts signicantly for the di#culty that opponents of the tent cities had
in reconciling the homeless with conventional notions of the public. By voluntarily
violating hygienic standards in her performance, Belmore was broadcasting her solidarity
with the homeless tent city protesters. Moreover, the voluntary nature of her actions
served to elucidate the nature of the protests for Tent Citys audience. !e deance
manifest in the marked deliberateness of Belmores gestures declared skepticism towards
the legitimacy of the conventions of the local public body, conventions that had in
practice brought about the exclusion of the homeless. In doing so, it elucidated the way in
which the tent city protests had similarly been organized by holders of an alternative set
of values, by a population whose members had subverted the disenfranchising function of
their di"erence by making it the basis on which they consolidated themselves into a
politicized counter-public body.
!e tent city documented by Belmore was the largest of several camps that had
been set up in Vancouver to house the citys homeless during the summer of 2003. !e
rst camp, situated in Victory Square, was established by the anarchist Vancouver-based
Anti-Poverty Committee in early July, on the same day the International Olympic
Committee announced its decision to appoint Vancouver host of the 2010 Olympic
Winter Games. Over the course of that summer, camps were subsequently established at
Strathcona Park, Crab Park, and Creekside Park. !e camps aimed to draw attention to
how the city had failed to provide enough social housing to meet the needs of its growing
homeless population, as well as to the recent legislation of cutbacks on social services that
promised to further compound the severity of these needs.
2
In an essay on Woodsquat
the 2002 occupation of the then-vacant Woodwards building on the Downtown Eastside
that comprises the 2003 camps most obvious precedent, also organized by the Anti-
Poverty Committee with the aim of highlighting the need for social housing in the city
Susan Pell considers the 2002 occupation in terms of its function as a counter-public
sphere
3
and o"ers an attendant consideration of its participants as a counter public.
4

First conceptualized in the 1960s by Jrgen Habermas, the public sphere is generally
understood as a discursive space in which individual members of a society, by means of
engaging with one another in dialogue about social issues of mutual interest, are
constituted as a public body whose opinions harbour the potential to wield
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2 Johanne Lapierre and Francis Murchison, !e Anti-Poverty Committee, Pan-American Social
Cycling Initiative project, November, 2003, http://cycloamerica.net/article/004en.htm.
3 Susan Pell, Making Citizenship Public: Identities, Practices, and Rights at Woodsquat, Citizenship
Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 145.
4 Ibid., 152.
institutionalized inuence over government policy.
5
As an apparatus whose function is
to mediate between the interests of society and the state that governs it, the public sphere
is obligated, in theory, to o"er admission to any member of society willing to participate.
However, as historian David Scobey notes in his study on the bourgeois promenade in
nineteenth-century Manhattan, the e#cacy of the public sphere has historically derived
from class barriers . . . that regulated who counted as the public and thereby limited the
diversity of interests that could legitimately compete for attention from the state.
6

!e homeless comprise one constituency whose members have not historically
counted as the public due to their incapacity to surmount such class barriers. As Pell
observes, an individuals membership within any given community is contingent upon his
or her success at fullling an attendant set of responsibilities.
7
Pell o"ers by way of
example the case of citizenship within a democratic body, which entails such practices as
voting and paying taxes.
8
As Luce Giard demonstrates in his work on alimentary
customs, however, there are in fact few, if any, instances of everyday conduct that are not
subject to measurement against local standards of behaviour whose achievement
constitutes a necessary condition for membership within any given community. For
example, in many places, Vancouver among them, middle class rules of propriety identify
private spaces as the only appropriate domains in which certain activities, including
sleeping and cleaning ones body, should be practiced; such rules persist as the residue of a
set of conventions that rst emerged in modern democracies at the end of the eighteenth
century, when the consolidation of the public sphere and a widespread consciousness of its
function as an open space of visible civic life
9
stimulated the excavation of a more
circumscribed and dened realm of privacy,
10
along with a subsequent identication of a
set of practices that should be performed only within its connes. Vancouvers
infrastructure both reects and serves to enforce such rules. Most public benches are
divided by arm rests into three seats, so that peopleparticularly homeless peopleare
prevented from sleeping on them. A series of free-standing public bathrooms were
installed throughout the downtown area to dissuade individuals from urinating and
defecating in alleys and outdoor alcoves, where their activities run the risk of being seen.
For the citys homeless, such features present the possibility of complying with local
middle class distinctions between public and private conduct when they o"er, as the
public bathrooms do, spaces of privacy, but as a constituency that otherwise has little to no
access to private space, and that must therefore carry out private practices in public, such a
compliance is otherwise not feasible.
11
Without the resources to successfully attend to this
Jessica Mach
3
5 Jrgen Habermas, !e Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964), New German Critique 3
(1974): 49.
6 David Scobey, !e Anatomy of the Promenade: !e Politics of Bourgeois Sociability In Nineteenth-
Century New York, Social History 17, no. 2 (1992): 205.
7 Pell, 149.
8 Ibid., 150.
9 Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, Te Spectacle of Intimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), 7.
10 Ibid., 67.
11 Don Mitchell, !e End of Public Space? Peoples Park, Denitions of the Public, and Democracy,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 1 (1995): 118.
particular responsibility, the citys homeless cannot make any legitimate claims to
membership within a hegemonic public body governed by middle class values. Moreover,
because membership within any modern public body theoretically rests, as Don Mitchell
notes, upon a foundation of voluntary association, the homeless are, by definition,
incompatible with any conventional notions of a public, for their essential incapacity to
withdraw from the public realm divests them of the capacity to voluntarily participate in it.
12

When the provincial government purchased the Woodwards building in 2001,
debate over how the building should be used emerged between those interested in
revamping the impoverished Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in which it stood into a
middle-class space on the one hand, and those advocating, on the other hand, for the
building to be converted into social housing.
13
In the fall of 2002, members of this latter
constituency, many of them homeless, would organize the Woodsquat occupation under the
leadership of the Anti-Poverty Committee to advance their agenda. The tent cities that
were established throughout Vancouver over the summer of the following yearincluding
the camp at Creekside Parkhad picked up where this first occupation had left off when it
was forcibly shut down in the winter of 2002, three months after its initiation. In a speech
made at a demonstration at Woodsquat, a protester offered the following declaration by way
of explaining why the movements predominantly homeless participants had chosen to
promote their cause in the way that they did:
We have tried these tactics of peaceful demonstration. We have tried the
participatory act of voting and asking for change. We have tried all idealistic forms
of resistance but to no avail. !is monster of capitalist imperialism must be stopped
now. . . . We must ght the battle in the streets for real justice and eventual peace.
14
!e occupations, in other words, had been occasioned by necessity. As individuals
who could not stake any legitimate claims to membership within the dominant public
body and whose concerns therefore did not amount to public opinion, the homeless
would have been idealistic to believe that participating in conventional sites of public
dialogue was a viable means of advancing their agenda. Faced with these circumstances,
the protesters sought to develop alternative means of conveying their voices to the
provincial government.
Both Woodsquat and the tent cities were conceived as two such alternatives. To
this end, their participants strived to ensure that each occupation commanded a
prominent presence in the urban landscape, a strategy that Belmores Tent City
acknowledged through its inclusion of footage of a sign that Belmore had erected on the
edge of the Creekside Park camp, reading !is Is !e Other Canada. !e Poor; Now In
Your Face! !e decision to establish a camp at Creekside Park, for instance, was
motivated largely by the parks adjacency to Science World, a major tourist attraction;
Victory Square, the park at which the rst tent city appeared in the summer of 2003, is
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12 Ibid., 118.
13 Pell, 149.
14 Ibid., 145.
home to the Victory Square Cenotaph, a Vancouver war memorial. By establishing the
occupations in areas where they would be seen by a large number of people, the protesters
were able to insinuate themselves into the public imagination as a distinct constituency
with an agenda that explicitly diverged from the values of the hegemonic public body.
!e occupations, in other words, had successfully consolidated the protesters into what
Pell calls a counter public: a body of individuals, bound by a shared investment in values
marginalized within a hegemonic public sphere, capable of articulating distinct opinions,
and therefore capable of competing with both a hegemonic public body and other
counter-public bodies for inuence over government policy.
!e live performance component of Belmores Tent City served to remind the
works audience of this political potential at a moment when the tent city protests, facing
local opposition that was culminating in the outright removal of tents from protest sites
by city workers even as Belmores work was being screened, had appeared to represent yet
another indication of the homeless populations disenfranchisement. !roughout the
length of the performance, Belmores bare feet gure persistently in the tableau
circumscribed by the lens of the video camera in the studio at Emily Carr. !is is not to
say that they remained a constant focal point: in much of the live performance footage,
Belmores feet are in fact cast to the tableaus margins. !ere, they constitute a backdrop
before which Belmores hands methodically execute a series of tasks reminiscent of the
steps of a cooking demonstration: laying out slices of bread across the mud, arranging
condiments and dropping a single raw egg upon each slice, stacking the slices into a pile
and pushing it to the margins of the video tableau, emptying out packets of McDonalds
french fries in its place and spreading them across the mud, ripping open packets of
ketchup and dressing the fries with its contents. Over the course of these operations,
Belmores feet slide in and out of the tableaus periphery, at moments commanding the
Jessica Mach
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Fig. 1. Rebecca Belmore, Tent City, 2003. Film still. Courtesy of grunt gallery.
tableaus center to be massaged and wiped down by Belmores hands. !e expanse of mud
that the cameras lens circumscribes and remains xed upon throughout Belmores
performance is modest, measuring only about twenty inches lengthwise; each of the
various operations that constitute the performance therefore take place in succession over
the same several inches of the lmed terrain in order to achieve a satisfactory degree of
visibility. Due to this circumstance, as well as to the permeability of mud and its
propensity to cleave, Belmores actions serve to endow each of the objects that she spreads
across the mud with the residues of one another. Her feet therefore command a sinister
prominence in the tableau even as they occupy its edges. For in initiating contact between
food and the ground, Belmore is not only conducting an intermingling between the two;
the sweat, bacteria, and various substances that are potentially cleaving to the soles of her
feet are involved as well, exacerbating the degree of adulteration that the food undergoes.
In accordance with Mary Douglass seminal work on purity and pollution, Luce Giard
notes that dirt is a relative idea: the conditions that must be met in order for
something to qualify as either clean or polluted vary from culture to culture.
15
As I
have demonstrated, the successful observance of local conventions constitutes a
mandatory condition for ones inclusion within any given community. But as I have also
noted, drawing on the example of how the homeless are obligated to perform private
activities in public spaces due to their limited access to private spaces, the capacity to meet
conventional standards in ones everyday practices is in fact a privilege. In her
performance, Belmore conducts demonstrations of two such practices, and deliberately
avoids meeting the local standards to which each is held. By setting her feetthe only
visible components of her body apart from her handsin mud, Belmore renders futile her
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15 Michel De Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, Te Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 171.
Fig. 2. Rebecca Belmore, Tent City, 2003. Film still. Courtesy of grunt gallery.
own attempts to successfully wipe them clean; by using the ground as the surface on
which to prepare a meal, she makes the food too dirty to eat. Failing to meet local
standards of hygiene, these enterprises constitute a metaphor for the conditions of the
citys homeless population. Belmores inability to wipe her feet clean evokes the di#culty
for the homeless of consistently maintaining a conventional standard of bodily hygiene,
given their lack of access to laundry and bathroom facilities. !e way in which she
assembles a meal on the ground, letting mud seep into the food, evokes practices such as
binning: the act of excavating objects that can be reused, including, in the case of many
homeless individuals, discarded food.
16






Yet it is imperative to note that none of the gestures Belmore performs in the live
component of Tent City are occasioned by necessity. Her feet, unlike the feet of many
homeless individuals, are neither infected norsave for the mud on her soles
particularly dirty. !e bread and the french fries and the ketchup are all edible by
conventional standardsthe last two are emptied out of brand new packagesuntil she
deliberately spreads them out across the ground. Her gestures intentionally defy
conventional rules of hygiene and propriety. Belmore acknowledges popular
conceptualizations of the homeless that render them indi"erent and even antagonistic to
(rather than incapable of following) conventions of appropriate and inappropriate
behaviour, and aggressively plays the role into which they have been cast. In doing so, she
reminds us that the failure of the homeless to follow these conventions has not merely
disenfranchised them, divesting them of the rights and privileges reserved for individuals
Jessica Mach
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16 Zoa Kiefer, Queen of the Nomads: My Journey Trough Family Court and Homelessness (Vancouver:
Rendu House, 2008), 58.
Fig. 3. Rebecca Belmore, Tent City, 2003. Film still. Courtesy of grunt gallery.
who can follow them; this failure, and the exclusion from the public body it entailed, has
been actively appropriated by members of the homeless as a means of political
empowerment, constituting the premise on which the alternative sphere of political
dialogue represented by the Woodsquat and tent city protests was established.
Rebecca Belmores Tent City is a work about transgression. Comprising footage of
Belmore breaching conventional rules of hygiene and images of Vancouvers homeless
explicitly encroaching upon public space for private uses, the work calls up the issue of
responsibility, and how the failure of the homeless to fulll the obligations prescribed by
the citys social order have entailed their exclusion from a hegemonic public body. In
performing her gestures in explicit deliberateness, however, Belmore reminds us that such
an exclusion has not merely served to disenfranchise the citys homeless; through
participating in the tent city, they have also mobilized around their shared exclusion, and
in doing so were able to achieve a distinct political voice.
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