In his performance pieces, St-Laurent often intervenes in public space where the audience is not observing but participating in the creation of meaning. For the exhibition, "Mountain Standard Time" in Calgary, St-Laurent produced the performance piece, "The Only Good Way to Hug Another Male in Public." In his performance conducted outside, St-Laurent was carried through the streets of Calgary slung over the shoulder of another man. There is no collected audience of informed observers, this is a "real" action where the participants are the general public and as a result, the conservative political climate of Alberta adds the appropriate context to the work. Significant to note in these interventions, and much of St-Laurent's work, is that "[…] they are related like day-to-day happenings, falling outside of most people's pre-conceived notions of art."11 Therefore, these acts can be disengaged with the construction of conceptual effacements in art dealing with identity by engendering an equally real reaction from the viewer. If one is fortunate enough to participate in one of St-Laurent's interventions or view his films, there is an integral relationship that he setups between the artist and the viewer. This relationship activates the viewer in the vernacular of the artist by referencing pop music, for example, as in "I Want You to Need Me," or bringing up associations with film culture as in "Monster," "Ogopogo," and "Sasquatch." More importantly in all his work St-Laurent uses himself to expand on traditional notions of self-portraiture by adorning the various guises, costumes, or personas that are critical to deconstruction of his own identity and how the viewer conceives of space and various personas-whether straight or gay.

An underlying vulnerability comes across in much of St-Laurent's work since his work maintains an intimate correlation to his own experiences. "I Want You to Need Me," a video where St-Laurent lip-synchs to the Celine Dion song of the same title, depicts the artist in a medium long shot where he sways his head emphatically with the music, however, when he begins to sing, the artist is spewing blood onto his beard and chest. As the vocals become more intense so too do the spurts of blood ejecting from his mouth. Like "Stand By Your Man," this latter video work is a good example of how St- Laurent uses the media to perform and record intimate acts, thereby, allowing the viewer to become privy his acts and is participating or witness to such action. In a text St-Laurent wrote for a collaborative project between Steven Cohen and himself, he discusses vulnerability as being the only thing a performer has in common with his/her audience. 12

Whatever relationship St-Laurent is negotiating, whether through film or performance, it is defined by his own self-proclaimed of "otherness." The viewer is invited into the artist's work as an individual, and the creation of the other offers the viewer a sense of pathos as an outsider from which to understand the artist's work and rationale. St-Laurent's work subverts what previous gay artists dealing with identity may have been able to achieve-acknowledgement through differentiation-by presenting unified images of what it means to be gay. While artists in a Canadian context such as Bruce La Bruce, Bruce Eves, and Attila Richard Lukacs, have all created controversial images of sexual desire in their art, whether or not these representations say anything about reality or have helped 'queer art' gain legitimacy outside of that category is debatable. It seems that artists working from a marginalized position need to work considerably more in order to achieve critical reception outside of the allotted and marginalized categories that society assigns. After all, society has this need to codify and often link queer art as deviant.13

St-Laurent is the ultimate other in his own work, a significant departure from how the general public might normally view contemporary art. As a queer and Acadian artist St-Laurent has described himself as being 'doubly-marginalized.'14 The artist attempts "to exteriorize" this identity but also identity in general. For St-Laurent it is difficult to be considered as a video and performance artist without a desire to produce a fetish-able object or document of the performance. He often presents himself in distinction to his contemporaries like Rodney Graham or Matthew Barney who stage productions but also produce documentation or prints to accompany their work. As St-Laurent states, "museums generally avoid having anything to do with live performances, they now have tangible objects to replace them."15

Although not wanting to be defined solely as a gay-artist, much of St-Laurent's work addresses society's constructions of a "gay community" and what that "community" entails. The western world's drive for cultural production, characterized by the Pop Art movement of the 1950's and '60s, has churned out fetishes and stereotypes of all kinds; seen this today in portrayals of gay culture on TV shows like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk. St-Laurent often subverts this same cultural production using his own body as confirmation of the absurdity of some of society's constructs. Carving out a personal identity becomes increasingly important in the face of ever more complex and subtle forms of societal ghetto-isation-in the case of St-Laurent's work, it becomes an issue of reifying and then subverting notions of existing in a 'post-colonial' world. Taking hold of an ephemeral media such as performance, or even video, is a challenging proposition to an audience more used to the either tangible or overtly confrontational, characterizing a mass conception of "art" and "contemporary art." That being said, St-Laurent's work is confrontational, but his actions, whether dressed as a drag queen, spewing blood, or being carried by another man through the streets of Calgary, place both the audience and the artist is just as equally vulnerable situations-whether through the act of performing or viewing.

Footnotes:
9 In terms of homosexuals in straight society St-Laurent maintains, "[…] not that much has changed for queers outside of metropolitan areas in the last decades. Even in Toronto, I wouldn't think you could get out of a gaybash if you kissed a boyfriend in a primarily hetero space." Interview, March 22, 2005.
10 On Categorization in the art institution: "the academic and museum worlds are obsessed with categorization to the detriment of some works. I really don't mind being labeled a queer, Acadian artist - it's the pigeon-holing I can't stand. If the exhibition theme is not queer, or Acadian, some curators think that my work will not fit. I think this is evident in Québec, because I am immediately seen as a politicized Acadian who does not share commonalities with Québec's plight" Interview, March 22nd, 2005.
11 Stefan St-Laurent (Email, March 12th, 2005.)
12 St-Laurent, S. Video Saved My Life. In Kika Thorne (Ed.) Video Ground Zero. Toronto: Vtape, 2002.
13 This is exemplified in the senator Jesse Helms attack on Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition "The Perfect Moment" in 1989
14 Interview, March 14th, 2005.
15 ibid