By Anna Be and Jeffrey Boone, 2024
“The straight jacket I designed and made out of hot pink acetate satin. (It was to be of silk but at $32.00 a yard what can a poor girl do!) The camera is stationary and the focus fixed; it is the straight jacket and the single light source that move.”1 – Kate Craig
A founding member of Western Front, Kate Craig, like many of her collaborators and fellow artists, developed personas that brought together multidisciplinary experimentation that synthesized art and life through avant-garde practices. One of Craig’s personas was characterized by the colour pink, referencing traditional ideas of feminine identity. To Craig, pink was a radical colour that she reinvigorated in many of her projects, questioning its diminishing status. In Kate Craig: Skin, Grant Arnold quotes Craig: “As a woman, why would you associate yourself with pink if you had any kind of feminist point of view? It was sort of retro.”2 Craig later went on to say that “pink clothing was extremely useful because it disarmed people. Psychologically […] pink is used as a colour to calm people.” Craig thought that the “prejudice against pink is unreasonable” and that Straight Jacket acts to face that prejudice head-on.3
Before her career as an artist, Craig wanted to become a costume designer due to her theatre background. In creating the straitjacket in an opulent pink satin, festooned with a line of double bows down the back, Craig collapsed traditional ideas of femininity into an institutional device for control. Craig recounts, “[The straitjacket] is beautifully made. The stitching is gorgeous. It is quite elaborate the way the ties are sewn. Because of the amount of sewing, it is extremely strong. You could never get out of that thing. It really is a straitjacket. The satin acetate is a really heavy material. Straitjackets are made out of, almost like canvas, very tight material.”4 Craig’s goal was to highlight the contradiction of a straitjacket being made of delicate, pink satin, and showcase “the ironic relationship between freedom and limitation.”5
The video work Straight Jacket was produced at Western Front and first screened there on 1 August 1980, and subsequently in 1982 at Festival ‘82 (A Celebration of Women in the Arts) and 1983 at Vancouver Art & Artists at the Vancouver Art Gallery.⁶ The video shows Craig modeling the pink straitjacket. The image is framed so that the garment fills the frame. Lit with a single spotlight, only the garment is visible in an otherwise black space. Craig rotates, displaying how the bespoke item fits her body. The sound consists of Craig’s voice reading (or singing?) words she wrote for the film, accompanied by a piano and a bass, transcribed here:
Inside out, inside out, the world is inside out
Inside out, inside out, love me inside out
planet turning in a jacket
Total torture off the rack
Some get paid off, some get laid off
Ideology is for fools
Inside out, inside out, the world is inside out
inside out, inside out, love ne inside out
The human race is out of date
Mutate, mutate
But me in your prison cell and leave me inside out
Inside out, inside out, the world is inside out
Inside out, inside out, leave me inside out
I believe in time, but I know it travels backward
Pumping oil and spilling power
I’m all done up now, lock me up
Inside out, inside out, leave me inside out
Condition pink, Mr. President
Killing time
Take me away and lock me up
Ideology is for fools
It fits me oh so perfectly
And keeps me calm and cool
Inside out, inside out, leave me inside out
Inside out, inside out, the world is inside out
Push the panic button
can’t do what I do
Twist and turn in pink and black out
The world turning in her Jacket
Black and pink and pink and black
Back to front and front to back
Junkies of the world unite
Try a new hallucination
Neutron bomb and Uncle Tom
Relax arms, limitation
Relax, arms limitation
Inside out, inside out, leave me inside out
Inside out, inside out, love me inside out7
Works from the Collection considers works in the Belkin’s permanent collections in conversation with ongoing exhibitions, programs and the world around us. This entry is part of a series written by students in the 2023/24 Seminar in Contemporary Contextual Issues for Museums and Curatorial Practice led by Nikki Georgopulos (CCST 501). Students worked with the Belkin’s Naomi Sawada, Teresa Sudeyko and Anna Tidlund to condition report, research and write descriptions about Kate Craig’s costumes that were recently gifted to the Belkin by Western Front and Hank Bull. To see more of the Belkin’s collections, visit belkin.ubc.ca/collection.
Images (from top): Kate Craig, Straight Jacket (film still), 1980. Courtesy of Western Front; Kate Craig, Straight Jacket, 1980. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of the Western Front and Hank Bull. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography. Costume support: Ken Labun.
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Image Bank explores the artistic collaboration of Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov with others, including their most spectacular works – extended performances with props, such as Colour Bar Research (1970-78) and Mr. Peanut’s mayoralty campaign (1974) – alongside their extensive mail-art exchanges with other networkers such as Robert Filliou, Ant Farm and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. The Peanut campaign, in which Vincent Trasov as Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver, mobilized the artists associated with the newly founded artist-run centre, the Western Front (est. 1973) and the exhibition includes many collaborations with and amongst these artists (Martin Bartlett, Hank Bull, Kate Craig, General Idea, Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, John Mitchell and others). The exhibition pulls films, photographs, drawings, collages and other ephemera from the Belkin’s Morris/Trasov Archive to track the collaborative history of Image Bank. Founded in 1970 and lasting to 1978, Image Bank was a project initiated by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova that originated when they were all associated with the legendary Vancouver artist-run centre Intermedia. The exhibition reflects on a period of optimism where artists envisioned a non-hierarchical alternative to the world of art galleries and museums, where images and ideas could be freely exchanged through the international postal system thereby creating an open-ended and decentralized method of networking that presages social media.
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