Skip to main content
q&a

Speaking with artist Deanna Bowen, I learn that The Paul Good Papers (an ongoing project that will have a further iteration at the Art Gallery of York University in January, 2013) continues to generate new meanings both for her and inquisitive viewers seeking to untangle this thorny Gordian knot of race and media, original voice and reportage, lived experience and learned example.

In American TV reporter Paul Good's 1964 interviews about an Alabama school-integration incident that you are working with, Good often coaches his subjects – the local white power brokers in particular. Can this be read as a kind of complicity?

No, that's how you navigate the South, as an outsider, a northerner. You have to take care of yourself, and you can't come in finger-pointing. You do have to sweet-talk to get the story. In my own experience, southerners have to feel that you are not going to come and reprimand them for the way they live.

And, in Good's archives, he interviews black locals as well, and black civil-rights activists, plus he recorded entire Klan rallies. Good's files are quite extensive.

Is Paul Good a hero to you?

I'm indebted to him. If he didn't have the courage to witness, we would never know anything about these incidents. And he had the wherewithal to remain composed, in order to interrogate and critique the situation in the moment. So, yeah, he's a hero.

You've inserted yourself into this history, especially via the performances. Is it difficult, emotionally?

To do this project requires so many roles, from researcher to naive spectator to interpreter to producer, which puts you in a self-conscious, creative place. But then there are moments when the words actually hit you, and it becomes a very personal engagement. And I don't like performing publicly at all! Ha! But it seems the only way to bring the work forward. It's a very raw experience.

What changes have you noticed as the performances progress?

The performance is rooted in an understanding of how the Ku Klux Klan spreads its message: through the repetition of rhetoric. So, we're doing the same text, every day. At first, we were terrified. The Klan had just been run out of Edmonton the week before.

What I wanted to see was whether or not the actor I paired with would find any of this ugliness inside them, after days of repetition. I wasn't including myself in this, but I should have! It starts to sit in your body.



This interview has been condensed and edited.



R.M. Vaughan

Interact with The Globe