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What matters is what you see. (Wichtig ist, was man sieht)
by Marlene Haring, 2005

three installations on the occasion of a group show at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver: outdoor signage and plumbers hemp; video without sound, 1min 40sec projected under a staircase; public washroom with mirror, Nivea cream

Marlene Haring has created two interventions and a small video projection, collectively titled What Matters Is What You See, which examine and critique aspects of the shifting politics of the body, the evolution of feminist and body art, and the relationship of each to institutional practice. She has draped the CAG’s outdoor signage, mounted on the glass-and-metal awning above the entrance, with thick, ragged plumber’s hemp. Obscuring the letters of the sign with what look like long, dirty-blond tresses — women’s hair with all its social and sexual connotations — the work seems to challenge the ways in which galleries and museums mediate our understanding of the gendered body.

In the CAG’s public washroom, Haring has smeared the round mirror above the sink with a thick coat of Nivea cream, an act that pitches visitors into the vexed realm of appearance and aging. This intervention confronts our complicity with the zillion-dollar cosmetics industry and our culturally manufactured compulsion to maintain an illusion of youthfulness, beauty, and sexual desirability. Seeming to both mock and grieve women’s abject condition, Haring’s video, projected under and behind the gallery’s indoor staircase, gives us close-up shots of the artist’s bare face as she silently laughs, cries, rocks back and forth, and rubs her teary eyes with her hands.

Text by Robin Laurence from 'Austrian artists play in the underworld' (The Georgia Strait, 14–21 July 2005, p. 53)