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In her videos, Suzanne Caines gives an account of the difficulty in living public space, shares its trouble, its failures, and questions the limits of a relational art. She creates situations, which approach certain social conventions that it seeks to destabilize by engaging the conversation. Her actions, very simple, raise several questions about the role of the artist in her community and about the waiting of the public.
The objects, which are used by her to interact with people, to involve herself in their daily life. Often, they reflect a cultural heritage and are agents of a memory, habits that reflect the manner of being of a social group. In Split Pea Soup, 2007, video that it carried out at the time of a residence in Portugal, Caines divides the counter of a grocer with the cashier and undertakes to be useful, without success, of a soup of peas with the customers.
In her step, the artist aims at creating situations, which are not cut reality. Whereas, in the years 1960, “reality becomes a concern first, with, for consequence, a recasting of the “world of art”, gallery with the museum, market with the concept of art itself”, it appears that this questioning forms from now on part of our assets. The artistic events in public space do not have the any more appearance of an exception and, either, are not invested of a revolutionary mandate. The art of intervention and participation has however to find its way among the cultural events centered on the spectacle, which do not make it possible the public to re-examine its waiting and of côtoyer other forms of diffusion and research.
In gallery, the repetition of the filmed scene, alternating on two screens, adds to the failure of the communication, the insulation of the subject. One finds oneself in front of a document which pains to restore a bond with the public. It remains that Caines registered the spectator in space in which the meeting is done, spectator for which the very whole situation becomes work. And that, Caines makes a success of it very well.
—Marie-Josée Lafortune
(Translated from French)
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