Teenagers are highly visible and highly mythologized agents of contemporary western culture. This demographic is targeted earlier and earlier as consumers, sexual beings and biocapital, with the mass media and advertisers in particular appealing to and exploiting the teenage drive to both conform and individualize. As Anita Harris notes: “It is primarily as consumer citizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life.”1 The growing presence and power of youth and the deluge of fears and anxieties around their behaviours, desires, and choices, have been reflected in and influenced by popular culture. Artists, musicians and filmmakers provide us with a cultural lineage of “misbehaving” teens, from the idiosyncratic films of John Waters to the recent Twilight series. Ideas of play, excess and experimentation figure large, as does the negotiation of systems of authority and the development and projection of self-identity. Age of Consent brings together the work of six Canadian and international artists who look at adolescence in various forms, exploring experiences (real and projected), perceptions (internal and external), myths, dreams and desires connected to this demographic and this time of life.
Leslie Peters’s 100 Prince Charles Drive uses source footage from the day before the artist’s sixteenth birthday, the very first time she used a video camera. Peters and a friend take on and switch between the roles of director and performer, reveling in the play of power enabled by the then-newly affordable domestic technology. We see the seductiveness of performing for each other before the lens and the boldness permitted by its mediating role. We witness Peters being and “performing” a sixteen year old, misbehaving and taunting the camera with practiced smoke rings and “up yours” gestures. The artist revisits this moment from her adolescence with time slowed, looped and made non-linear, revealing the human compulsion to understand the present through the past, and to re-inhabit and re-imagine our younger days.
Historically, the teenager is a relatively new cultural phenomenon that came into being at the turn of the last century, tied in with urbanization and a rapidly changing economy. It could be argued that our current consumer society is based in effect on a teenage sensibility— a perpetual present characterized by a flippant next-thing mentality populated by adults who can’t, or won’t, grow up. Certainly a quick survey of mainstream television or hit box office films would indicate this trend. Teenagedom is often conveyed (and at times experienced) as flanked by compulsions of socialization and anti-socialization, and much of its representation swings between these poles. So teens are both violent and vulnerable, highly sexualized and innocents needing protection; bored, apathetic and unproductive while also the key to the future.
Being “young” is generally equated with inexperience and uninformed naiveté, and consequently teens are pitched as questionable in the knowledge and articulation of themselves. Both New York-based Sue de Beer and Berlin-based Tobias Yves Zintel work with teen performers and collaborators to create compelling, fantastical films. Zintel’s Neverland Rising, 2010, mixes music, dance and theatre to look at themes of growing up and self-identity in a surrealistic mash-up where subconsciousness and reality are equal partners. De Beer employs space as a metaphor for psychological or emotional terrain. Her works are often filmed in theatrical sets of teenage bedrooms—that iconic sphere that signifies both safety and confinement—and draw on a range of youth culture references from stuffed animals and figurines to signifiers of grunge and gothic subcultures. Along with her 2005 video piece Black Sun, included in Age of Consent are a selection of De Beer’s photographs that riff off the gratuitous imagery of horror movies and speak to the media sensationalization of teenage violence that haunts the North American collective consciousness.
With their melancholic and diaristic quality, Rebecca Fin Simonetti’s drawings could decorate the walls of a teenage girl's bedroom. Her personal inventory employs animal totems such as lambs and horses, frequently associated with girlhood. The girls in her pictures are most often alone or accompanied by these animals—both lifelike and in various states of dying or inanimation—summoning a place not quite real and not quite imaginary, but hovering between the two. Her work deals obliquely with desire and longing, looking at the difficulty of social relations, of searching for a communion with self and with others.
A particular focus within this exhibition is the notion of girlhood, its role as cultural capital, and how it relates to contemporary feminisms and the construction of femininity in western culture. Wendy Coburn explores the imaginary of a young girl that sees her desire reflected nowhere on earth. Untitled (girl & dog) depicts a dangerous ambiguity when innocent youthful play may become proscribed as an act of deviant sexuality. Kyla Mallett’s photographs of notes passed between schoolgirls magnify an often devalued social practice, honouring its unique coloured-pen language of adolescent love and frustration. These works present girlhood as a “contradictory rather than coherent subject” in an effort to “understand the ‘girl’ not as a singular state defined by age or behaviour, but as a constantly shifting, discursively constituted sign that comes to mean and represent many things besides ‘young female.’ ”2
For all the artists, the question of the adult spectator (and creator) begs interrogation. These youthful representations must be, after all, the projection of adult fantasies and desires—idealized, sentimentalized, regretful, abandoned. They tap into the connection between temporality and adolescence, which is often framed as emblematic of the liminal, a transitional phase to move through to achieve a more stable state of being. Coming-of-age tropes of awakening, blossoming or maturing mark many teenage narratives, regularly accompanied by personal/sexual/social/moral enlightenment. In this regard, adolescence stands as an allegorical state, allowing for a level of instability in regards to self-identity.
Queer theorists provide useful frameworks to think about time, applying queerness as a non-normative methodological approach that is not limited to sexuality in a narrow sense. Elizabeth Freeman writes of the “chronopolitics of development,”3 referencing the internal and external pressures associated with the passing of time, unpacking the idiomatic directive to “grow up” that is tied to perceived productivity, itself linked to capitalist values of so-called progress and profit. This conception of queering time challenges the assumption of a linear, “correct” path of development. Tim Dean discusses the concept of becoming through what he terms a queer notion of futurity: “As a ceaseless movement of being that is not coordinated by teleology or development, becoming never results in anything resembling an identity.”4 So there is something in the works in Age of Consent that celebrates wading in the uncomfortable unknowing of adolescence, and asks how this paradigmatic period shapes the formation of the self and continues to inform adult subjectivity. The artists included are interested in looking at the hinge between then and now, allowing for a fluid movement back and forth. In The Queer Child, Kathryn Bond Stockton writes of growing sideways instead of up because it suggests that “the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts.”5
