small dead woman/Last Seen
Images by Kevin Yates
Words by Diana George and Charles Mudede
(www.artspeak.ca, www.clearcutpress.com) $12

In Forest of Symbols, the anthropologist Victor Turner describes what he calls the liminal. The term derives from the Latin word limen, or threshold, which in psychology means the line between that which we can and cannot perceive. For Turner, it is the third space, or the space between the known and the unknown worlds. It is a place of transformation, ambiguity, and marginality: "neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and [ceremony]."

The liminal events of human life are birth, marriage, death, and rites of passage; Jesus and all prophets are liminal figures. Objects can also fall into this realm: Consider this book, which is at least triply liminal.

Produced by Vancouver's Artspeak gallery, small dead woman/Last Seen is a coordinated collaboration between the Halifax visual artist Kevin Yates and Seattle writers Diana George and Charles Mudede (who is also books editor for The Stranger). The book is little, yellow, and different: Shaped like a manila file folder, it begs to be placed into evidence in the same moment it intentionally confounds various systems of classification.

Small dead woman/Last Seen begins with photographs of Yates' Artspeak exhibit from earlier this year: an unnervingly human, small Sculpey woman, prone on the gallery floor. In the far corner, the moon, or what at first appears to be a slab of tree trunk but is in fact an elaborately constructed replica. Curator Lorna Brown writes in her introduction that "removing the setting, props, character and plot serves to eliminate any narrative possibility or mystery to solve, leaving only the tiny vulnerable object and our desire to examine it." George and Mudede's "Last Seen," an essay on the Green River killings and the "public wilderness" in which they occurred, also opens up and excavates the field of death. The way into the subject, and the form of the book, is through this notion of liminality.

In aboriginal cosmologies, the liminal presents the possibility of spiritual and physical danger. It is imbued with sacred (and polluting) power, or awe/fear. This fear has not been abandoned by "rationality"; it remains. The concept of liminality also contains the notion of the outskirts, the geographical borderland.

In "Last Seen," we learn that in 1973 the Port of Seattle bought the areas surrounding Sea-Tac airport and emptied them, in order to create a noise buffer and make room for future expansion. Hidden in this bureaucratic transaction was a magically creative action. George and Mudede write, "Together, the empty houses and the surrounding nature formed a new kind of space: a public wilderness, a conflation of areas, a produced emptiness: a manufactured nothingness that crosses both the realms of the social and the natural."

In fact, death is drawn to Sea-Tac not because Sea-Tac is evil, but because both are liminal. Why isn't this place simply a graveyard? Why is it marked by murder, in particular? It is the uneasiness, uncanniness of Sea-Tac that attracts murderers. Murder gives death liminality plus: death as a transgression of life, and the act of murder as transgression of the social order. In mimetic fashion, the transgression of murder longs for a transgressive context. This is why, as Brown writes in her introduction, "public wilderness carries the signification of 'crime scenes waiting to happen.'"

But all is not gloom. The ambiguity of the liminal can also be regenerative. Think of how the creative and the transgressive are mixed: Think of much performance, queer, and trans art--hell, think of Shiva. (This voluptuous subject itself takes a liminal form in this book.) Think of the between-zone as genre-mixing, the blurring of disciplines and practices. If Foucault says that "discipline fixes; it arrests and regulates movements; it clears up confusion," then we might say that interdisciplinary expeditions work to unfix, to glorify irregular movement, to sow necessary confusion. Certainly this small book is one such example.

Unfixing is at the heart of Artspeak's mission, which makes it a liminal space in itself. The gallery's early association with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing has placed it within an interdisciplinary community of writers, poets, critics, and visual artists, and as a result it focuses on work that crosses the boundaries between disciplines. Sometimes artists and writers are paired because of an associative link in their practices; in other projects, more intuitive collaborations lead to publications such as Underside of Shadows, Passengers, and Tour Guides.

There is even another liminal space: the poetical research of George and Mudede, which lies betwixt and between documentary research and the subliminality of art. Or, we might speak of this last third space as the space between politics and art. Mudede says the book is "ultimately a political project. We made sure our position was not that of indifference but of great concern about the fate of these unfortunate women. They were not unfortunate because many worked as prostitutes, but because they suffered violent deaths. After the politics was the literary concern; the subject of serial killers is dominated by the true-crime form, as in Ann Rule's work, with occasional moments of literary journalism, such as Truman Capote's. What we wanted was something that destroyed these popular or highbrow ways of writing about serial killers and introduced a whole new language to the subject."

In fact, there is a newness in the liminal, and Turner also wrote that liminal people or societies in a liminal phase are "a kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change." We should embrace the creativity and awe of the liminal. This is the only way, after all, to rescue it from fear. Our geographies will be increasingly of borderlands; some of us sense already, it seems, that this will require entirely new kinds of maps.