DO YOU THINK THIS IS EASY? NORMA'S DOG DAY AFTERNOON
Norma's "Dog Day Afternoon"
Intervention, Vancouver, May 12, 2003
Part of the series "Expect Delays", Artspeak
By Catherine MacLennan
Photo credits: Recorder
An afternoon in a park. Two people playing Frisbee. Three business people chatting. A jogger. A woman with a pushing a baby carriage. Someone on a cell phone, someone reading. A normal scene.
Look closer: There is a billboard nearby depicting the exact same scene... Listen: these seemingly ordinary park occupants are speaking, or shouting lines from Dog Day Afternoon. The Frisbee player taunting "Attica, Attica;" the jogger shouting to someone: "Do you know what it's like to be in prison?" The business people discussing "the plan." The mother with the baby carriage (which on closer inspection, does not have a baby in it), demanding: "Do you think this is easy?" A Norma scene...
"Expect Delays" was the name of a series of off-site projects organized by Artspeak (an artist run center in Vancouver) and curated by Kathleen Ritter that took place around the city in April and May 2003. The eight artists/groups involved were "invited to create public infiltration works that use modest engagements in daily life to critically investigate the social conventions, pedestrian movement and regulation of public space." Vancouver lacks planning (in the best sense) but this does not lead to a sense of freedom, quite the opposite - this at the same time a city of limitation and regulation, as noted in the "Expect Delays" material: "upscale residential developments are placed on the periphery of red-light districts... codes of behavior in social and urban space in this city are much more restricted and surveilled than in other locales... and unlike other cities there are few urban spaces where groups of people can gather, protest, or create a public forum." It is in this setting of socio-environmental asphixiation that the artists in "Expect Delays" were to intervene and infiltrate.
Norma is a collective of eight artists (Vanessa Kwan, Josh Neelands, Christy Nyiri, Pietro Sammarco, Diana Lopez Soto, Erica Stocking, Ron Tran and Kara Uzelman) based in Vancouver. Norma's contribution to "Expect Delays," "Dog Day Afternoon" critiqued the use of park space, both the typical commercial pronouncement of what a park space consititutes, i.e. who or what would or would not be included, and the limitations a specific Vancouver park setting. The billboard and the Norma scene represented the typical fake society of advertisements/brochures/propaganda for condominiums or residential developments that always depict a scene of happy, carefree bland zombie-consumers posed in unnatural recreational scenes. Both the happy consumers and the strip of green designated "parkspace" are simply obliging accessories to sell real estate. Norma acted out the required scenes of carefree recreation, but with the addition of dialogue from the gritty film Dog Day Afternoon, a movie which featured sympathetic central characters that were sweaty, swearing bank robbers, one who had a wife and kids on welfare and was performing the robbery so his boyfriend could have a sex change operation - not the sort thing showcased in real estate promotional material. In addition to critiquing the general commercial consensus as to what a park should be or who it should be for, Norma specifically highlighted the deficiencies of the 'park' they were performing in. Josh Neelands pointed out that this smallish scrap of discarded land, sandwiched between an overpass and busy traffic-diverting streets was designated park space because of a mixed business-residential zoning that requires a minimum of green space. The "park" and its obvious deficiencies were familiar to Norma. Josh Neelands: "We all walk past there on our way to school" (Emily Carr College of Art and Design). Pietro Sammaroco: "What were the designers thinking?" (I can agree with this sentiment, having often passed through the area myself. It is quite obviously a required begrudging strip of land, contemptuous of a genuine park commitment, and certainly not landscaping architecture in the tradition of Frederick Law Olmstead... )
Josh Neeland: "We were using 30 second - 2 minute snippets of dialogue from Dog Day Afternoon looped together." Pietro Sammarco referred "theatre" of the real robbery, with the people in the street participating, an interaction also depicted in the film. Erica Stocking added that the original robbery itself has become something that can happen over and over (the robbery becoming a film becoming an entertainment that can begin as one wishes). In the film, added Diana Lopez Soto, 'normal' social interactions changed as the tellers "became friends" with the bank robbers. At the Norma performance, people sat down, when they saw others (Norma) in the park. Other interactions included an enthralled child, oblivious passers-by, people that were aware of the project and others, walking by vaguely aware that "something strange was going on, and strange that anything would go on there" (this spot is usually not used except as a short-cut ). Piertro Sammarco: "There were different audiences." Different audiences responding to the real and the unreal.