Kaitlin Till-Landry interviews Martha Wilson.(Interview)

Martha Wilson began making artwork while living in Halifax in the 70s and teaching English at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Adopting the emerging conceptual language of the art world, Wilson's early video, photo, performance and text pieces addressed gender and identity politics while articulating an acute sensitivity to enactments of the self under the surveillance of the camera and the male gaze. For Posturing: Age Transformation, produced in 1972 at the age of 25, Wilson photographed herself made up as a 50-year-old woman trying to look 25. At the time, as Jayne Wark accounts in Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosier, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson, even the artist Vito Acconci dismissed Wilson's work as "self-indulgent and irrelevant." Yet Wilson's early work inhabits a conceptual aesthetic to call attention to the way surveillance makes the subject perform. It is extremely personal, highly political and ardently feminist.

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KAITLIN TILL-LANDRY (KTL) It seems that there were parallels between your photo-text works and your video pieces. For example, between your video Deformation (1974) and photo diptych I Make Up The Image Of My Deformity, I Make Up The Image Of My Perfection (1974). Was there an intention to make corresponding works in both still and moving formats?

MARTHA WILSON (MW) At the time when I was doing this work, each piece was a completely separate venture, and I used video because it was the appropriate medium for that idea. Decades later, I looked back at it and I realized that it was one big lump of concern having to do with The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which is the title of a 1959 book by Erving Goffman, who was a sociologist. Vito Acconci recommended it when he came to NSCAD. Goffman's book …