“Phallus in Wonderland” 1 : Role Plays with Joyce Wieland
After gently pouring tea into each of our cups, Phyllis Lambert pushes a plate of delicate accompaniments arranged for our meeting in my direction. A shortbread cookie seems mess-free, so I take a few bites even though it is fairly small in size. I don’t have time to nibble, I tell myself, and put down the last bite of the sweet. Sitting in the conference room on the top floor of the Shaughnessy House at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, I reach into my tote bag to pull out a copy of the exhibition catalogue for Passion Over Reason: Tom Thomson & Joyce Wieland recently presented at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
Inspecting the exhibition’s didactic panels during my visit, I had discovered that many works in Passion Over Reason were on loan from Lambert’s personal collection. I remembered reading that Lambert was a patron of Wieland’s. Of course, I had to interview her. I was curious to hear the story behind each of these relatively small, intimate works she owned and how they came into her possession. In the pink room where most works from Lambert’s archives were exhibited, I turned around to give one last look to the artiste ardente in the painting Artist on Fire (1962), a work from the Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s holdings, before the gallery closed.
Lambert and I are browsing through the catalogue, turning each page slowly, occasionally both at the same time, in silence. “Oh, I love those, I adore that, I am sure I got that one, all of those,” she exclaims. The shy tension in the room disperses with Lambert’s profuse excitement over Wieland’s artistic ingenuity. A burst of laughter is prompted by the sight of a pale, soft, untitled coloured pencil drawing of a nude woman lying on her stomach, propped up on her arms, a delicate yellow flower in her hand, leaning her head upward, her lips kissing the muzzle of a goat. “Oh, it’s wonderful! Here it is! I have this little one, but I particularly love Adventures of Lapin, Tuktu and Shithead Von Whorehead in Akinada (1970) because I was very much interested in her attitude towards nature that I absolutely found wonderful, and I loved her humour! I enjoyed her freedom, this wonderful freedom…”
Lambert recounts how she was introduced to Joyce Wieland in Toronto in the mid-seventies, through her dealer Av Isaacs, who was looking to fund the production of Wieland’s feature-length romantic comedy film (1976). In our interview, Lambert emphasizes that she liked Wieland immediately. It was during this particularly intense period of creation for Wieland that they became close friends. Lambert pauses to look at film stills from the main characters, Eulalie and Tom, are in an embrace while they are swimming – before adding that what created a real bond between Wieland and her was Claude Debussy’s piano composition Wieland’s heroine Eulalie plays this piece in one of the scenes of . It resonated with Lambert because she had done a
