WORKING FROM HOME: ACTS OF DOMESTICATION IN DIANE BORSATO’S THREE PERFORMANCES

It’s safe to say that, as a child, I performed roughly two dance recitals per week in my living room. After about twenty minutes, I usually awarded myself a few arbitrary trophies and then decided to call it a day. Sometimes I appeared in short musical productions that were almost always highly derivative of either West Side Story or the Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast. The storylines of these productions were often left unresolved and always reworked in subsequent performances in my bedroom. They usually incorporated costumes, sometimes make-up, and very rarely any kind of audience. I can’t really pinpoint the moment when these performances ended, but eventually I grew up, moved out, and left them all behind at home.

And perhaps that’s where what I understood as home became so complicated. After spending a year living in university residence, which essentially offered a very clear definition of home simply by representing its absolute antithesis, I moved through a series of different apartments. It was difficult to reconcile the obviously nostalgic ideas I attributed to domestic space with its seemingly new definition as not much more than a place to keep things. I needed a new way of seeing this idea of home. So when I moved into my third apartment, I thought about how I might try something different. Instead of thinking of the space as only a container of actual objects or absent ideals, I began to look at it as a potential place for production or action. I set out to work on art projects at home instead of in studio spaces. Initially, when I started using my apartment as the site for video work, I tried to cover up the fact that it was the space I lived in by concealing objects that might signify the kitchen or the living room. When I realized that a lot of what I was doing in front of the camera involved dressing up and, for all intents and purposes, just playing around, I started wondering what would happen if I stopped trying to disguise the space. If my fridge happened to be in a shot, it would stay there, as would the bookshelf or the couch. It felt a lot more like being that child again, performing for no one in particular if only because the performative impulse existed. Suddenly, there was something about it that made more sense to me, as though something was being activated that had gone unnoticed up until that point. There seems to me to be something about domestic space that is uniquely conducive to behaviours relating to dress-up and play. There is just something really appealing about the ways in which new or otherwise unexpressed identities can be created and explored in this space.

At the same time, I realize that to consider the home as a strictly positive ground for imagination and creativity would not only be relatively shortsighted and naïve, but also quite problematic. As a cultural site, it comes heavily loaded with meaning and historical context. Notions of domesticity have long been entangled in issues of gender, identity, work, and power. Leslie Weisman asserts that “in associating the workplace with male power, impersonalization, and rationality, and the home with female passivity, nurturance, and emotionalism, distinctly different behaviours in public and private settings, and in women and men, have been fostered.”[1] This binary has historically helped to form “legal arrangements, spatial settings, behavioural patterns, social effects, and power constellations”[2] that pervade understandings of the home.

What interests me in all of this is the prospective overlap of these very different conditions as they may apply to the same space. As Weisman goes on to argue, reconnecting “this schism through new spatial arrangements that encourage the integration of work and play, intellect and feeling, action and compassion, is a survival imperative.”[3] To me, this suggests that the potential exists for the inventive possibilities of the home to be reconciled with preconceived views of domesticity. But what kind of creative actions might take place in such a culturally invested space that might reunite the ideas championed by Weisman? How might such actions confirm or challenge pre-existing definitions of the home, and how could they potentially alter our perceptions of that space?

I believe that some possible answers to these questions lie in the recent video work of Diane Borsato, particularly in a piece entitled Three Performances (After Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and Bonnie Sherk) (2008)[4]. The three-channel installation shows the artist re-creating iconic works of performance art in her apartment, substituting herself for the artists and her cat for the wild animals they worked with. The performances she re-enacts are Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), wherein the artist isolated himself in a gallery space with a coyote for several days, armed only with a large felt blanket and a shepherd’s crook; Marina Abramovic’s Dragonheads (1990-1992), a series of performances where the artist would sit motionless in the center of a ring of ice while snakes circled her body for warmth; and Bonnie Sherk’s Public Lunch (1971), which took place at the San Francisco Zoo and had the artist eating an elegant catered meal in a cage adjacent to the lions and tigers, who tore apart their raw meet during public feeding time. By re-enacting these performances, Borsato writes that her idea was to “take these iconic, somewhat life-risking or heroic feats and domesticate them.”[5] I believe that by transplanting these performances into a domestic space, the artist engages with Weisman’s imperative fusion of work and play, intellect and feeling, action and compassion. Her feats of domestication open up a new way of reading this space, which becomes the location for acts of reclamation that bring together work, play, and home. It becomes a site that no longer requires these sorts of distinctions, but rather favours flexibility and fluidity, making room for permeability and multidimensionality.

In order to better understand how this can all be made possible, perhaps the most effective point of departure would be to discern the conventional definitions of domesticity with which I believe Borsato is engaging. Since notions of domesticity seem so inherently gender-biased, and because this artist is a woman, it would seem to me to be valuable to look at the historical development of domesticity primarily as it is articulated by feminist authors. In her text, “Figures of wo/man in contemporary architectural discourse”, Gülsüm Baydar explains that sexuality played an important role in discourse about the house as early as the Renaissance. The home was considered a site of order dictated by man and marriage, and it was expected that women would maintain this organization.[6] She states, “the order of domesticity [was] based on the active agency of men and the passivity of women.”[7] Furthermore, these conceptions of the domestic, “which are deeply rooted in patriarchal societies, remained unchallenged until the emergence of feminist movements in the nineteenth century.”[8]

The division between public and private space associated with the home as we understand it today was also a development of the nineteenth century. Hilde Heynen writes, “the term [domesticity] refers to a whole set of ideas that developed in reaction to the division between work and home. These ideas stressed the growing separation between male and female spheres.”[9] This separation helped to support a belief that men were “fit to take their place in the public sphere of work and power, whereas women were relegated to the private realm of the home.”[10]  Heynen points to a direct connection between the notion of the domestic ideal on one side and the rise of industrial capitalism and imperialism on the other. A growing number of educated middle-class women became the primary consumers of cultural products, from books to decorative objects, which helped to typically gender mass culture as feminine.[11] Toward the end of the nineteenth century, domesticity and masculinity were increasingly perceived as oppositional, and values of “intimacy, nurturing, and comfort were increasingly perceived as threatening the reproduction of masculinity.”[12]

With the rise of modernism during the late nineteenth century, this divide only became more pronounced. Furthermore, a divergence began to develop between domesticity and modernism itself. It was perhaps “modernism’s association with the idea of the avant-garde” that caused this division, as having an attachment to avant-garde principles often “had a built-in tendency to being undomestic.”[13] The stability, continuity, and tradition that were generally associated with the domestic were entirely at odds with modernist notions of simplicity, abstraction, and authenticity. The decorative aspects of feminized mass culture, which seemed to encourage ornamentation or sentimentality in dwelling spaces, stood in opposition to a modern architecture that strove for the sublime. Architects like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier saw little purpose for previous conceptions of the home, and “advocated a new way of living in which residences would be reduced to machines for living that would offer their inhabitants only the barest minimum of decoration.”[14] And since domesticity was so closely linked with mass culture, it could in no way be associated with high art. As Christopher Reed contends, “in the eyes of the avant-garde, being undomestic came to serve as a guarantee of being art.”[15]

As the twentieth century progressed, roles and expectations for women began to shift with the help of the women’s suffrage movement and subsequent feminist advances. Nonetheless, women’s magazines, published books, and private diaries “confirm the dominance of “traditional” marriage in 1950’s America as a pervasive and powerful institution” which functioned as a “virtually unchallenged vehicle for social and cultural activity in and around the home.”[16] It was this conception of domestic space that modern feminist artists found suitable as a location for reaction or intervention. It was the ideal site for the questioning or critiquing of gendered power structures that had been developing and solidifying throughout previous centuries. As Baydar asserts, the “domestic sphere is arguably the most potent place to explore the spatiality of gendered power relations” as it “regulates the seen and the unseen in [a] symbolic order.”[17]

This notion became the ideal point of departure for many modern feminist artists. In the 1940s, for example, Louise Bourgeois addressed the symbolic connection between the house and women’s bodies in her drawings entitled Femme/Maison, which expressed a frustration and anxiety through the depiction of the home as a sort of prison for women. In Hollywood, California, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro led a group of women on a project called Womanhouse (1971), which sought to satirically analyze oppressive, gendered roles for women in the actual domestic space of a rundown house.[18] The installation provided each woman with a room or space within the home to be used for artistic intervention. Many of the resulting artworks re-created specific domestic sites, often interrogating their roles in informing gendered identity through subversion or exaggeration. These projects could essentially be read as attacks on preconceived notions of domesticity that aimed to break down prescribed gender roles, critiquing pre-existing binaries in an aggressive and overt way. In light of the long history of the home as a culturally determined space, these types of decisive, assertive actions were perhaps required in order to catalyze new ways of thinking through domesticity.

Projects like those undertaken by Bourgeois, Chicago, and Schapiro helped to break open the meaning of home so that they were made available to later thinkers and artists in a new way. Old definitions could now potentially be re-imagined for new purposes. Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed state that postmodern feminists of the next generation aimed “to undo the conventions that neglected or disparaged categories of culture associated with women – prime among these, the home.”[19] They held a commitment to an idea of the home, not necessarily as a site of oppression or as symbolic of an idealized past, but rather as a space in which to enact a better future.[20] This is partly how I understand Borsato’s interaction with domestic space. By domesticating pre-existing performative actions, she is subtly working to enact this better future which no longer requires the sorts of distinctions made in the past. Her home becomes a simultaneously public and private space, being a personal dwelling that will later be exhibited publicly in a gallery space. The often perilous, avant-garde work of the performance artists becomes playful and accessible to both artist and audience through the process of domestication. The work she takes on does not seek to interrogate the same sort of binaries as the Womanhouse project, but rather folds them in on one another, creating an overlap of work space and domestic space that no longer makes the same demands for definitions or distinctions. Meanings of work, play, and home become interchangeable and impossible to differentiate.

Because Borsato’s videos rely so heavily on site, I believe that it is also significant to consider how her interactions with domesticity function within the context of site-specific art. Miwon Kwon describes the initial site-specific artworks of the 1960s and 1970s as attached to actual locations and tangible realities whose identity could be located in an assemblage of physical characteristics. She states, “site-specific art, whether interruptive or assimilative, gave itself up to its environmental context, being formally determined or directed by it.”[21] This is essentially the realm of Schapiro and Chicago’s Womanhouse:  the physical characteristics of the house were absolutely required in order to express the oppressive, prison-like qualities several of the artists were specifically addressing. The specific site of this rundown house, rebuilt and renovated entirely by this particular group of women, is essential to the identity of the artwork. Were it to be transplanted to a different space, even if that space were a domestic one, its meaning would certainly be altered. As with most early site-specific art, “to remove the work is to destroy the work.”[22]

Just as the definitions of domesticity became unfixed in the wake of these projects and with the advent of postmodernism, site-oriented practices became similarly flexible throughout their own historical progression. More contemporary projects could perhaps now be better described as “context-specific” and, instead of requiring specialized locations to signify particular meanings, they “signal an attempt to forge more complex and fluid possibilities for the art-site relationship.”[23] Kwon points to the underlying nostalgia of the idea that site and identity are fundamentally bound to the physical actualities of a place, suggesting that this does not adequately reflect contemporary life, which is frequently being described more as a network of unbound processes that could not possibly answer to the same kinds of semiotic demands.[24] Instead, she proposes a shift that favours deterritorialization. This shift could make possible the fluid “subjectivity, identity, and spatiality as described by Deleuze and Guattari” and act as “a powerful theoretical tool for the dismantling of traditional orthodoxies.”[25]

Borsato’s work could be interpreted as engaging with this dimension of context-specific art. It relies on two entirely different sites at the same time: the domestic space and the exhibition space. While the space of the artist’s apartment is certainly particularized and undoubtedly contributes to a lot of the underlying meaning in the videos, the spaces in which they might be exhibited are infinitely variable. They could be shown in an institution that requires payment upon entry, which would shape a very specific type of public for a public context. They could also potentially be purchased privately and therefore viewed in a distinctly non-public way. When I saw them in August of 2008, they were on display at the Power Plant in Toronto as part of a show entitled “Not Quite How I Remember It”, curated by Helena Reckitt. Admission to the gallery was free for the summer, and the constituents of the public that formed that particular public space were likely more variable than they would have been if the videos were shown during a time of year when admission is regularly charged. Whatever the case may be, the dual-sited nature of the project practically ensures that it will not get stuck in one particular spatial reading. While the private space of Borsato’s apartment will always be that domestic space, it will also always be in tension with the space in which it is shown. The traditional dichotomy between public space and private space as it is understood within conventional conceptions of domesticity is destabilized and made porous. We are left with a more contemporary perception of the boundaries of these spaces, where “private space is revealed as infinitely public, private rituals publicized […] and these in turn connected to the public matrix.”[26]

There is, I think, also something similar to be said for the ways in which the artist engages with preconceived notions of work as they pertain to domesticity. By this, I do not mean to suggest the predetermined division between home and work that can be attributed to the traditional gendered separations of those two spheres, which seem to be more applicable to the dualism that earlier feminist artists sought to critique. Rather, I am more interested in the ways in which Borsato works through ideas about labour as they relate to art production and the home. Christine Poggi contends, “the domestic sphere is also the ideal site of artistic production understood as unalienated labour”[27] that enables a sort of merging of life and work into a comprehensive whole. It works in conjunction with an existing inclination to discredit the opposition between public and private spaces and aims to reunite the individual and the social, public world.[28] What is so particular about the Three Performances videos is not that the work is being done at home, but rather that pre-existing work is being appropriated and re-thought through domestic space. In this respect, the domestication of the original performances also serves as a way of translating an avant-garde seriousness into something more accessible. By borrowing these particular performances, “Borsato not only pays homage to those iconic figures and key gestures, but also critically refreshes their work” for a new audience who might only be familiar with them “through text-book documentation and art historical mythologies.”[29]

When I had the opportunity to talk with Borsato about the experience of making these videos, she told me the following story:

I actually shot the video first in an art gallery. I used a white studio sort of space, and I was really unhappy with it. They were really stark and just seemed so contrived and it didn’t do what I was hoping the videos would do. And I think I was a little nervous. I was like, “oh, I have to do something at the Power Plant so I have to make something austere and art-like,” you know. “It has to be white!” And then I just decided kind of spontaneously that we would re-shoot everything the next day in my apartment and that really, really resonated with me. I thought that was the way to do it and it turned out being the right thing. Because it has this feeling of, you can just re-enact performance art in your apartment. Like you just use what’s at hand, like the snow and the house cat and the kitchen table. It’s just about a kind of accessibility of these experiences.[30]

This story reveals a lot about the very process of working through the translational action. When dealing with the work of someone like Joseph Beuys, who has a kind of mythologized art historical persona, and working with a well-established institution, like the Power Plant, there seems to exist a type of expectation for a level of austerity and seriousness. At the same time, when the translation is treated with a similar level of stark reverence for high art that surrounds the original piece, there seems to be something about the result that feels inactivated. By re-enacting the piece in her home and thereby domesticating the performance, Borsato is able to “take it out of that big, international, grand, only-Joseph-Beuys-would-do-it”[31] context and make it available in an everyday way. The work becomes less entangled in obscure conceptualization and is instead more approachable and readily accessible.

One of the key factors that makes this accessibility possible is the sense of humour that operates throughout the videos. I wouldn’t describe it as an overt or assertive kind of humour. There is a certain funniness that seems to exist effortlessly within the gesture of re-enactment. When I first watched the videos, I couldn’t help but laugh at the slippage of meaning and overall sense of irony that came across in Borsato’s actions. It is this kind of humour that I believe can be interpreted as a kind of feminist strategy that works in conjunction with the artist’s use of domestic space. Donna Haraway writes that “[i]rony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes” and “the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is […] a rhetorical strategy and a political method.”[32] By holding the sometimes incompatible elements of work, play, and home together in a unified space, Borsato demonstrates the fallacy of the barriers that exist between them. In its own right, each is necessary and true in terms of this re-imagining of domestic space. In order for domesticity to be made permeable, these different points of tension need to be held together so that all can co-exist. The result might be humourous, but there is undoubtedly serious play operating beneath it all.

The use of humour might also be construed as a feminist mode of disrupting authority and accessing power that works in a unique way in these videos. Jo Anna Isaak suggests that “women have a special purchase on laughter as a strategy of liberation […] that could enable a break or subversion in the established […] social structure.”[33] While this may be true, the way in which Borsato employs a sense of humour causes laughter to work on a more subtle and nuanced level. Isaak goes on to explain that contemporary women artists have used humour or laughter as a tool to discover “ways to interrogate the generative nature and generative bounds of representation” and to examine “its structural elements, its conventional limits, [and] its immanent possibilities.”[34] For me, this is a more apt description of Three Performances. The videos activate a more complex type of comedy that goes beyond what could have been a collection of one-liners aiming to disrupt a preconceived social order. The humour doesn’t seek to strike down a patriarchal power system. It takes to task a representational system. The work is capable of being both irreverent, subversively addressing the original performances, while also honouring them and revitalizing them. The combination of the very serious performance art and the very understated, relaxed, and funny atmosphere of the artist’s home answers Weisman’s call for an imperative fusion of work and play, intellect and feeling, action and compassion. The humour offers a deterritorialization of domestic space.

One of the absolutely essential elements that makes Borsato’s gestures so funny in the first place and an integral component of the entire project is undoubtedly her cat, Helen of Troy. When Borsato wrestles with her felt cover and shakes her cane as Joseph Beuys might have done, the cat seems completely disinterested and appears happiest when lying down next to the artist taking a nap. When Borsato plays Abramovic and sits motionless in the circle of ice, Helen sits on her lap “suggestively grooming herself”[35] indefinitely, completely oblivious to the camera. And when the artist’s partner, Amish Morrell, places a raw steak on the floor for the cat and Borsato begins to eat her sophisticated lunch like Bonnie Sherk, the cat spends only a few seconds investigating the meat and the rest of the time trying to figure out how to climb the table to eat the artist’s food without being pushed back onto the floor (and she proves to be a rather formidable and determined adversary at that). It is clear that the cat has a certain level of agency that is unpredictable and uncontrollable.

This stands in stark contract with the relationships between the artists and the animals they work with in the original works of art. Beuys, Abramovic, and Sherk set up conditions that could essentially predetermine the behavior of their animal counterparts, in all cases positioning the animals as a representation of “other” to oppose or complement their roles as human. Borsato explains,

we had to work with whatever the cat felt like. She didn’t have a script. She wouldn’t follow one if we gave her one. For me, I like also that [Three Performances is] not predictable and it’s not controlled by the artist to some extent. I think the artists in all three of those pieces had very clear intentions about what they wanted to say about their relationships with nature and wild animals. And something that’s well known about house cats is that you can’t train them to do anything. They have a mind of their own. So for me it was about the agency that this animal had, who is sort of natural, sort of a cultural intervention. This animal is a funny in-between that’s unpredictable.[36]

In positioning her cat in this manner, Borsato’s work is similar to other recent work that employs animals. For example, Brian Jungen’s Habitat 04 – Cats Radiant City (2004)[37] recreates Moshe Safdie’s design for Habitat 67, built this time out of plywood and carpet. During the exhibition, homeless cats lived in the structure and roamed about it freely. Jungen does not seem to be interested in any diametric relationship that exists between humans and animals. If anything, he seems invested in the commonalities that exist between the two. In the cases of both Borsato and Jungen, consideration is given to the cats’ agency and subjectivity.

Out of all of the animals in the works associated with Borsato’s videos, it seems to be only the house cat – the quintessentially domesticated animal – who behaves unexpectedly and who appears to challenge the animal-human dichotomy. For Beuys, this distinction is clear even if mythologized. The coyote represents a wild spiritualism that is both revered and manipulated, to a certain extent, by the thinking human shaman. For Abramovic and Sherk, the snakes, lions, and tigers are dangerous animals that are predictably driven by instinct, who contrast calculating humans. These all factor into age old notions about the animal-human binary, particularly associated with Cartesian distinctions that distinguish humans as thinking beings separate from all other living things.[38] As Jacques Derrida put it, philosophers like Descartes, Heidegger, Kant, Lacan, and Lévinas have established sound and profound discourses, but “everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them.”[39] In that essay, Derrida considers the experience of being watched by his cat while he is naked in the bathroom and wonders what the animal might see or think when looking at a nude human. He contends that the failure of those previous philosophers to acknowledge an animal’s moment of address or act of looking pointed towards “a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it.”[40]

Derrida’s cat takes on great significance in the essay as an animal who is capable of responding to its previously unacknowledged subjectivity “in its own way, […] suggesting or simply signifying in a language of mute traces, that is to say without any words.”[41] This is perhaps the same way that Helen performs in Borsato’s videos. Instead of being manipulated into a set of predictable, typically animalistic behaviors, she is free to react to the artist and the environment with whatever capacity she has to do so. In some instances, it even seems like Borsato and her cat are interacting on mutually performative terms.  I see this as a method of response to presumptions about animal-human relationships and ideas about the natural versus the domestic. Roles associated with these terms are always shifting, and it is sometimes the artist, shaking her staff excitedly, who takes on the part of animal and contrasts with the laissez-faire attitude of Helen. The cat appears to domesticate the artist at one point, finally enticing her to stop rustling around with the Wall Street Journals long enough to lie down quietly. The videos not only illustrate domestic space as potentially multidimensional and permeable, but also enable those who inhabit it to shift between identities without responsibility to preconceived roles or expected behaviors.

Three Performances covers all of these territories, renders all of these notions flexible, and leaves room for all to overlap. It is a tricky thing to contend with so many big ideas, from the contextually loaded space of the home, to the grand, sweeping gestures of Beuys, Abramovic, and Sherk. Borsato seems to work delicately with all of these things to create a subtle and nuanced interpretation of a culturally determined space. She explains that, in the end, the work is about “our secret, private lives, too” and how “we tend to have all these experiences that are not just sort of practical and day-to-day.”[42] There are ideas, events, and encounters that could potentially materialize here that shape our understanding of domestic space in varying, personalized ways. In between the objects and architecture that make up the home, there exists real lived experience that is formed by these potential encounters.

Which leaves me in my own apartment with my own cat, wondering why this all automatically made so much more sense as a child. Of course I would seek out secret, impractical experiences – that was just what you did as a kid at home. So what is it, exactly, that changes to form the gap between living at home and moving into an apartment? I’m not entirely sure. I have to feed myself now and pay for the space that I live in. Maybe that feeling of need for serious, adult work starts to sneak in and the importance of paying the heating bill logically surpasses the importance of covert dance recitals. But if the bills are paid and I’ve got enough food to make breakfast the next day, I can’t guarantee that I won’t be somewhere in my apartment in some strange getup doing something completely and utterly impractical.

There is always work of some kind to be done.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baydar, Gülsüm. “Figures of wo/man in contemporary architectural discourse.” In Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial production of gender in modern architecture, Gülsüm Baydar and Hilde Heynen, eds. New York: Routledge, 2005. 30-46.

Borsato, Diane. “Three Performances (After Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and Bonnie Sherk).” Diane Borsato. <http://www.dianeborsato.net/three.html>. 25 Oct. 2008.

Derrida, Jacques. “The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)” trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002). 369-418.

Friedman, Alice T. “Domestic Differences: Edith Farnsworth, Mies van der Rohe, and the Gendered Body.” Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Christopher Reed ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 179-192.

Haar, Sharon and Christopher Reed. “Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism.” Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Christopher Reed ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 253-273.

Heynen, Hilde. “Modernity and domesticity: tensions and contradictions.” Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial production of gender in modern architecture, Gülsüm Baydar and Hilde Heynen, eds. New York: Routledge, 2005. 1-29.

Isaak, Jo Anna. “The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter.” The Artist’s Joke, Jennifer Higgie, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 110-115.

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Personal phone interview with Diane Borsato, 25 Nov. 2008.

Poggi, Christine. “Vito Acconci’s Bad Dream of Domesticity.” Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Christopher Reed ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 237-252.

Reckitt, Helena, ed. Not Quite How I Remember It. Exhibition catalogue, Toronto, ON: The Power Plant, 2008.

Vidler, Anthony. “Homes for Cyborgs.” Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, Christopher Reed ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 161-178.

Weisman, Leslie K. “The Spatial Caste System: Design for Social Inequality.” Discrimination By Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 9-34.