Drinking In The Kitchen, Irene Loughlin

Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen Video still: Tagny Duff

We enter into the kitchen of Latitude 53 and find a place to sit on the floor. Irene Loughlin stands behind the table and grabs a bottle of dark scotch whisky. She proceeds to take copious amounts of drink from the bottle. Then she sits down next to the kitchen table. Slowly she sinks into the chair and lays her upper torso across the table.

This is a semiotics of the kitchen – of sorts.

However, it is not the same kind of Semiotics of the Kitchen performed by Martha Rosler on video in 1975. Whereas Rosler performs (while deconstructing) the engendering of gender in language through kitchen objects, Loughlin performs the excess of the sign experienced in the throws of drunkenness. She makes martinis and margaritas to the rhythm of Rosler’s video which plays as a loop on a VHS monitor placed on the kitchen table. The two performances collide and converse. At moments, Rosler’s articulation of “fork” and motions to jab the air is juxtaposed to Irene’s chopping of lemons with a butcher knife. The audience laughs at Rosler’s exaggerated mocking gesture and simultaneously grimaces nervously at Irene’s vigorous cutting motions. The collision between Rosler’s and Loughlin’s actions produce slippage and breakdown of language. I feel it. So does the audience as Irene serves us martinis and margaritas for the hour long performance.

I watch as Irene stumbles around the kitchen. The ice dispenser on the fridge is stuck. So she walks back to the sink and grabs some ice from the bag. She proceeds to put the ice and vodka in a martini shaker and shakes vigorously. Then she pulls at the lid to open it. But it’s stuck. She tries everything to open it. It won’t open. Members from the audience offer to help. They can’t open it either. Finally Todd leaves the gallery with the shaker and comes back with it opened. Irene proceeds to make martinis and adorns them with olives and lemons. She walks around the table and hands them to people who gratefully accept them.

She pours the ice into a blender and fumbles to switch it on. The smell of burning quickly fills the kitchen. Someone from the audience suggests she put some alcohol in the blender. It needs liquid, otherwise it might burn up the motor. She pours too much vermouth in. Everyone groans. The pouring and mixing of the margaritas continues to intermix with the rhythm of Rosler’s voice “ ladle”, “knife” and “apron”. I am offered a margarita and begin to drink it, even though I am video taping.

The laughter amplifies and gets increasingly louder through the hour of drinking and watching Irene make the drinks. We are complicit and participate in her drunken, clumsy stupor. This kind of social drinking is acceptable. No-one in the room turns the offer for a drink down. The drinks are too strong—too much vermouth and vodka—mixed with strange, horrific garnishes like cucumber, creamcheese, donuts and lemon.

When all the liquor is gone, Irene stops her work. She takes a quick swig of the bottle. Before it disappears, a slight foam appears in the bottle. I realize that it is coke in the bottle. Irene is performing her drunkenness. Everyone in the room, on the other hand, is noticeably intoxicated.

Irene grabs a gun.

There is more laughing. We follow Irene out of the kitchen to the street. She walks in her high heels and apron, with determination ahead of the crowd of people following her. As we walk past a bar, one guy sees us and says, “If you were a native and carrying a gun, the cops would be here in two seconds”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

We reach a parking lot. Todd, Juliana and other people set up a shooting range against the brick wall of a building. Irene watches intently as 12 cans of beer are shaken and stacked on top of each other. The beer cans tumble, and have to be reset. We wait.

I hear the sound of cop sirens. They grow louder. I look at Irene standing in the parking lot holding the gun, and notice the nervousness in the crowd. The sirens get louder. I wonder what will happen when the cops come. Who will the take the fall for possession of a firearm- Irene or the gallery? What about the public drunkenness and consumption of alcohol? Will the cops let it slid because we are participating in art, which is often the case? I wonder at the complicity we engage in. No-one interferes with Irene’s excessive alcohol consumption. No-one in the audience or on the street stops Irene from walking down the sidewalk with a gun. Unlike pedestrians in the street, we, the invited audience, know this is a performance, and want it to “go well”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

The sirens never arrive. Irene turns her attention to the beer cans and takes aim. She shoots. She’s a straight shooter. All the cans are marked off, and one by one geysers of beer fountain. The crowd is relieved. We clap.

Irene’s staging of drunkenness in the intimate space of Latitude’s kitchen and its spillage on the streets addresses the affects of private and socially legitimized forms of substance abuse. Loughlin reverses the audience-performer role, through the manipulative strategies often employed by social drinkers. “I will drink if you will”. “I will join you in a drink”. But the drink is more than a drink. In this case, the exchange drinking is in excess of its own signification of “alcoholism” or “addiction”.

To join in a drink is potentially as invigorating as it is dangerous. Like Irene, Brian Jungen also brought beer to an art audience in a recent piece Beer Cooler (2002) to “share” in a friendly exchange of “spirits”. The pretence of drinking as a form of friendship may simultaneously be read as a ritual of territorialization. Irene’s friendliness with the audience was similarly a strategic ploy. Getting the audience drunk shifted the terrain of the performance. The audience welcomed her generous gift. Yet her generosity of gift was given on false pretence, she was sober and intended the audience to experience the effects of intoxication. We followed along with her offer and directions. When she takes out a gun, we don’t doubt her motivations. We know that she will be firing the gun at some point because the program said so. But we don’t know how or when or even why, but we go along with it. We trust her, even as we walk down the street with an armed weapon, albeit only a pellet rifle.

Again, I think of the guy at the bar who stated that Native people would not be so invisible when carrying a gun. Irene knows this. The performance of shooting is a direct reference to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s performance “Shooting the Indian Act” presented in Surrey, England. In this piece Yuxweluptun shoots a paper copy of the Indian Act to protest the ongoing effects of the legislation on Indigenous People. Irene, similarly shots at cans of beers to reject the gift of alcohol and the legacy of ritualized dependency and consumption of intoxications. Within this legacy, the intimate space of ones own kitchen has the potential to become a public shooting range fraught with undercurrents of violence. Casual exchanges between friends and strangers become suspect. Micro-exchanges of these gifts (bottles of wine) are to be received with some trepidation. The semiotics of Irene’s kitchen is overfull. They spill out of the bullet-ridden holes of language, urban dwellings and city streets.