Our journey with Jeanne Randolph (*1943, CAN) across inconspicuous public structures continues. Having obsessed over the empty parking lots around her hometown during the pandemic in the publication P LOT P, we turn now to a previous work that focusses on the architectural structure of the payphone. Documented in photographs and paired with written observations by the artist, the telephone booths spread across Manitoba Canada have become subject not only for their standardized 1950s design and its modernist implications, but for their function, as well as their form, as having become obsolete. In reduced, no-frills documentation these booths are shown as empty platforms on which the everyday used to be performed – now alien.

Telephone Booths is a book work that originally took on the form of a performance lecture resembling an improv or stand-up comedy routine. In it, Jeanne Randolph explains how payphones were places associated with surveillance (the brother of Orwell’s 1984) and unsuitable shelter options in horror movies, with technology feats and the grid aesthetics of the Seagram Building and Yves St. Laurent’s Mondrian Dress. Always Jeanne Randolph implies in her texts and breaks with where we expect her commentary is going: “I believe we could say the grid was King when we talk about Modernism in its purest forms, to the extent that the grid probably became erotic. Wild moose thought so. Dented, shattered glass booths had puzzled park rangers until the vandal was at last observed: rutting male moose were charging full speed into their own reflections.”

As did P LOT P,  Jeanne Randolph’s Telephone Booths operates on two levels. The first is that of the subject matter, the interest in public infrastructure and what specific pop-cultural, historical and geographical references its images are attached to. Telephone Booths is also a story of local Manitoba. The second is that of a tool with which to navigate the relationship between viewer and art work. These images are a non-space, a space of projection, taken with an iphone they do not claim photographic quality, but are rather more focused on the fact that these telephones have been shot by a telephone that in turn will be recognized as we recognize the booths – as a thing of the past. The texts, on the other hand, are casual, subjective, almost diaristic, they transform the simple telephone booth into a slightly lost and humorous one-person structure of communication.

Jeanne Randolph is a critic, artist and psychiatrist. Her works often take on formats that meld imagination and reality, that make us go to the fuzzy area in our minds that is memory, musing, dream. This melding stems from her interest in the relationship between art and psychoanalytic theory, especially in object relations theory as developed by D.W.Winnicott and Melanie Klein. Instead of entering art via the Freudian mechanism as expression of and gratification for the psyche of the artist, under which the viewer is required to unlock its hidden truths, Randolph explores art works as transitional, or, as she names them, amenable objects. Understanding objects as amenable opens them up to exploration, they serve as plaything between inner and outer life, as a prop with which to test perception, or phantasy against reality. An object is always subjectively conceived even if it is objectively perceived, and it is this blurring Randolph pursues throughout her work so as to engage the viewer or reader critically. The art object is no longer the central starting point from which to derive meaning but rather a thing with which to understand ourselves in our surroundings.

Jeanne Randolph’s writing practice spans from theory essays such as The Amenable Object (1983) and Why Stoics Box (2003), ficto-criticism of art exhibitions, a genre in which a more distant voice of the writer is interrupted by unconventional pronouns and self-doubt, and fictional writings such as Fifty Normal White Men: A Scientific Report (1987), My Claustrophobic Happiness (2020), and Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming (1989), in which she writes about her method of appropriating notable psychoanalytic texts and changing the texts political implications by replacing one body part with another – the penis with the nipple, say. On this she writes: “The method was obvious. What made it so maddening was the effect. Why expend so much effort, wit and prowess to sustain the illusion that the relation between theory and practice is ridiculous? What was my motive? It hardly seemed possible it was anything but pretence. All the other athletes agreed you could get the job done without all that pretending.”

Jeanne Randolph's publication P LOT P, which was published in the lead-up to the show, can be downloaded as a pdf here and has been printed in an edition of 50 unnumbered copies. A printed copy is priced at 10 EUR / 12 CHF plus shipping costs and can be ordered by sending your delivery address to info@lateralroma.eu.

The publication P LOT P and exhibition Telephone Booths were organised together with Dominic Michel.

Thanks to Yoan Mudry.

Telephone Booths will be open on the following days:
20 April, 2–4 pm
NEW! 24 April, 10 am–1 pm. Dominic Michel, who organised the show with us, will be present on this day.
28 April, 2–4 pm
The exhibition is otherwise open only by appointment. Please contact info@lateralroma.eu if you'd like to come by. The space allows for a visit of maximum 3 people at a time.

Thanks to Yoan Mudry.