Charlie Gillis - National Post - Saturday, June 28, 2003

VANCOUVER - The organizers would have us believe that Vancouver -- and by extension the rest of Canada -- grew up a bit this week. The kind of public display of sex long considered banal in Europe went off here Thursday without a hitch, without the cops bursting in blowing whistles, or the city sliding into moral chaos.

The clocks kept ticking, the church bells still rang. No one even showed up to protest.

The evening's most illuminating observation came from Dana Williams, the 28-year-old chef who agreed to strike, um, a blow for artistic freedom by engaging in oral sex with his girlfriend before an audience of 35 paying customers and the assembled national media. When the inevitable question about performance anxiety came up, he looked into the cameras and smiled.

"You know that dream you had in grade school? Where you show up to class and realize you have no clothes on?" he asked. "Well, this was it, in real life. I was lying awake thinking about this last night. Tanya was lying awake. We really had to be there for each other."

They really did, and they really were. For 25 silent minutes, Mr. Williams and 23-year-old Tanya Seltenrich lay pleasuring each other in the so-called "sixty-nine" position at the Art of Loving erotic gallery in Kitsilano, while artist Martin Guderna scurried around covering their limbs with red paint.

As the couple did their thing in the crowded, stifling-hot room, Mr. Guderna captured an imprint of their bodies by covering them with a bolt of wet linen, pressing it into their flesh and peeling it off to hang on a string behind them.

It is hard for me to think of this as high art -- though the image did blend chaos and symmetry in a funky kind of way. Even after hearing Mr. Guderna's diverting explanation, in which he listed the shroud of Turin and cave images like the hands of Altamira among his inspirations, I'm still not sure I understand.

I can, however, accept what he did as a form protected expression, which makes it more the pity the police didn't show up after issuing dark threats of charges under Criminal Code provisions forbidding "obscene, indecent or immoral" theatrical peformances.

In that uniquely Canadian way, nothing got solved here Thursday because, frankly, nobody in authority was inclined to act.

A quick legal quiz: If you're the police in Canada, how do you respond when someone flouts an out-of-date law that, deep down inside, you favour? Answer: You do nothing. Because while doing nothing sets a precedent of sorts, suggesting you won't investigate if others do the same, it also keeps the matter away from the courts, who are likely to throw open the door to the behaviour you hope to proscribe.

That is why I'm willing to bet no one will try to open a live porn theatre in Canada any time soon. That a Vancouver couple got away with making love this week before a paying audience in a Kitsilano gallery says nothing about the legality of public sex performances. How do we know this? Because we don't.

And we certainly need not worry about the federal government clearing things up. Ottawa could have long ago excised subjective and unconstitutional language like "immoral and indecent" from the Criminal Code, yet still have banned performances that are harmful or degrading. There was no end of precedent for doing so, notably a 1997 decision on lap dancing that established harm as the chief test for obscenity.

But I hardly need mention the track record of the federal Liberals on such matters. With Alliance types and Tory premiers nattering in their ears about "judge-made law," the Grits are always happy to let the courts grapple with divisive and awkward moral issues that don't play well at church suppers in New Brunswick. Why split the voters when the courts will do it for you?

The police, for their part, weren't clear about why they failed to show up but, then, they really didn't need to be. They had betrayed their gut reaction on June 10 when they promised to lay charges should the performance go ahead. And that put them on a direct collision course with John Ince, the owner of Art of Loving, who happens to be a lawyer well-scarred from battles against Canada's antiquated sex laws. He was prepared to defend the performance in court, and it was hard to imagine him losing.

So it came as little surprise that the vice squad e-mailed Rishi Gill, the lawyer representing Mr. Guderna and the gallery, the morning before the show politely declining an invitation. "I think they're stepping back from the position they took initially, and they're doing the right thing," Mr. Gill concluded. "There are so many more important things in the world we could be dealing with other than this. I'm not saying police are justified in pursuing some sort of investigation. That's their duty. But really, what is the big deal?"

Mr. Ince, for his part, seemed a tad crestfallen at the police absence, left as he was to pontificate about society's presiding fear of sexuality and the threat sex poses to institutional power. The audience, too, was anticipating some sort of standoff. Kevin Brooker, a friend of Mr. Guderna, denied people came exclusively to witness a confrontation. "But there's always that titillation," he added. "All of us would have felt worse if the cops had busted in. We would been like fans at NASCAR when [driver] Dale Earnhardt died. We went for a wreck but now that we see one ... "

The antidote to all of this was the refreshingly candid pair at the centre of the action, who spoke afterward with humour about a performance they were to repeat last night and this evening. Neither is a professional actor, though Ms. Seltenrich does some work in stage production. Mr. Williams, a chatty, balding character with a modest collection of tattoos, described the atmosphere under the sheet as "hot and sweaty and sticky" -- a crisp summation of what we already know about sex. (Most in the room, by the way, agreed Mr. Williams performed admirably under the circumstances.)

Mercifully, neither he nor Ms. Seltenrich tried to inflate the meaning of their performance.

"This project is nothing more or less than this project," he shrugged. "What we're trying to do, maybe, is distill it. This is what we look like as a loving couple, and maybe that'll get across. Maybe people will understand sex better, and look at it as a healthy thing."

They are words of surprising maturity considering the basic silliness of Thursday's spectacle.

Perfect, you might say, for a country that seems ever more childish as it tries to grow up.

cgillis@nationalpost.com
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