Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith [Illustrated] 0822347822, 9780822347828

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Enacting Others

Enacting Others

Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

Cherise Smith

Duke Universit y Press Durham & London  2011

© 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Duke University Press greatly appreciates the support of the University of Texas, Austin, in the publication of this book. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges a University Co-operative Society Subvention Grant awarded by the University of Texas, Austin, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

For G and S and W and B

Contents

xiii 

ix  Preface Acknowledgments

1  Introduction

1 27  “The Politics of My Position”

Adrian Piper and Mythic Being 2 79  The Other “Other” Eleanor Antin and the Performance of Blackness 3 135  “Other-Oriented” Performance

Anna Deavere Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles 4 189  Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the

Repackaging of the Politics of Identity 233  Conclusion 243  Notes 277  Bibliography 293  Index

Preface

The ideas delineated in this book grew out of insights gained from the course “Cyborgs and Synthetic Humans” taught by Scott Bukatman in the fall of 1999 at Stanford University.1 In the course of my duties as a teaching assistant, I came to realize that many science fiction texts are thinly veiled allegories that meditate on racial difference and identity. Human characters are surrogates for whites: they and the fictional societies in which they are embedded are depicted as normative and sought after. By contrast, nonhuman characters are substitutes for blacks: they are portrayed as possessing key differences, such as superhuman strength or subhuman intelligence, which normalize their powerless and debased position in the fictional social pecking order. These narratives typically take one of two courses: they advocate for integration and tolerance by encouraging viewers (who are always presumed to be white) to see the “humanity” in nonhuman characters, or they promote the maintenance of strict boundaries between humans and nonhumans in order to preserve the established hierarchy. I was eager to apply that framework to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982 and 1991)—the ever-popular film based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and to which considerable critical energy has been

devoted—so that I might consider its take on race and the politics of difference. On the surface, the movie has two tidy story lines. The first centers on a bounty hunter searching for a group of renegade robots that are trying to pass themselves off as human in order to seek revenge on their designer. The second focuses on the identity crisis of a female robot that is unwittingly passing for a human. I argued, in a research paper, that the narratives borrow from an earlier tradition of antebellum memoirs of runaway slaves passing for white, such as William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Craft, Jacobs, and other authors made a case for the abolition of slavery by dramatizing the inhumanity of slaveholders and highlighting the humanity of slaves and blacks by underlining the latter’s visual likeness to whites. Similarly, the story of the female robot that mistakes her identity and passes for human, I suggested, derives from late nineteenthand early twentieth-century passing accounts, such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), in which black/white mixed-race or mulata characters who think they are white suffer an identity crisis when they learn that they are, in fact, black. I reasoned, in short, that Dick’s and Scott’s renegade robots were runaway slaves transported into the science fiction genre. Still, questions remained: why does the film disguise the plot by figuring the characters as renegade cyborg beings rather than runaway slaves? Why are the barely camouflaged slave characters played by white rather than black actors? And why does the narrative remain coded as black even though efforts were made to transform its racial relevance? For me, it boiled down to an interrogation of why blackness, divorced from its usual ethnic and cultural signifiers, is available for such transmission and adoption, even while I knew the answer to at least one of the above questions: white actors were cast in the roles of black characters in an effort to “universalize” the plight of the robots, take the plot out of the particularistic realm of black slavery and appeal to “universal” audiences, that is, white spectators, who might not otherwise sympathize with visibly black characters.2 My interest in Eleanor Antin’s, Nikki S. Lee’s, Adrian Piper’s, and Anna Deavere Smith’s performances across racial and ethnic boundaries, one of the primary topics explored in this book, was born of those investigations. I question the strategies the artists employed in representing identity and the stakes involved in their enacting of identifications other than their own. I seek to understand what their boundary crossings tell us about the

moments in which they were instantiated and why performance was their medium of choice. Perhaps most importantly, I aim to come to terms with what their boundary-crossing performances convey about identity and the politics surrounding it. I should admit up front that I once told a friend “I’m an old school integrationist.” Shaking her head and laughing skeptically, she asked what I meant. I believe people should identify themselves how they want; that individuals should be what they want and with whom they want. I deem difference to be just that, and I dream that equality for all will prevail. My friend rolled her eyes at my Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky ideas. I have these opinions because I imagine that my parents, an interracial couple, thought they were taking part in a hopeful experiment when, in the late 1960s, they decided to have a child. My ideas of equality are afforded as much by my position as a working-middle-class Southern Californian as by my childhood in the 1970s. Having now lived the majority of my adult life outside California and experienced various kinds of bigotry, I harbor the notion that everyone should have equal access to everything, that slipping between identities is a birthright. Still, I am a realist: great strides have been made in leveling the playing field, but gross inequities persist. The boundary-crossing projects studied in this book offer glimpses of the freedom, tolerance, and empowerment that the artists and I imagine. I approach the performances by Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith with a mixture of hope, longing, and skepticism.

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Acknowledgments

I would not have undertaken this long journey without the critical guidance of my professors at Stanford University: Pamela Lee, Scott Bukatman, Harry Elam, and Peggy Phelan were invaluable resources. I remain grateful to Wanda Corn and Arnold Rampersad for their commitment to my success; I only hope I can be half as prolific and professional as they. My sincere appreciation to Moira Roth for her intellectual openness and generosity of spirit. Since arriving at the University of Texas, Austin, I have benefited from the counsel of Jill Dolan, Michael Ray Charles, Edmund Gordon, Omi Osun Olomo, Joni L. Jones, Ann Reynolds, Roberto Tejada, and John Yancey. The research and writing of the manuscript was made possible by generous funding from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and an ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art during the dissertation phase. Postdoctoral work on the manuscript was funded by fellowships from the Getty Foundation, the Ford Foundation and, at the University of Texas, the College of Fine Arts and Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. Thanks to my colleagues and friends for challenging me

to sharpen my ideas and analyses: Gwen Allen, Corey Keller, and Gabriela Muller (members of the Stanford writing group); Sarita Canon, Ralina Joseph, and Lisa Ze Winters (members of the East Bay writing group); John Mackiernan Gonzales, Frank Guridy, Jemima Pierre, Juliet Hooker, Deborah Paredez, and Jennifer Wilks at the University of Texas, Austin; Amy Mooney, Gwendolyn Shaw, and Cassandra Jackson; and Meta Jones, my writing and training partner. I am grateful to Tara Kohn and Rose Salseda-Gómez who have been sharp and reliable helpmates. The academic audiences I encountered at the Art History Department at the University of North Carolina; “No Laughing Matter,” the conference on visual humor at Dartmouth College; the Art History Department and Visual Culture Program at the University of Southern California; the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University; “Autobiography/ Women/Performance,” the symposium on African American and African Diasporan Women in the Visual Arts at the University of Maryland; and the History of Art and African American Studies departments at Yale University provided tough and much-appreciated questions that impelled me to expand my thinking. My thanks go to the anonymous readers of the manuscript as well. I am deeply appreciative of Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith for creating the complicated and compelling works considered in this book. It has truly been a pleasure devoting time and energy to them. None of this would have been possible without the support of my family. Natalie and Charles Okeke offered stability during chaos, and for that, I am forever thankful. I received similar sustenance from Nancy Johnson and Arthur Bryant. My sincere appreciation to Karyn and Jim Jakobs for giving assistance at a crucial time. I am grateful to Sandra Crayton, Gary Matthews, and Sandy Simmons Matthews, as well as to my siblings— Trailaria Aikens, Mercedes Hebert, and Gary Matthews Jr.—for having faith in me. I thank my parents Connie and Victor Smith for setting me on the path to curiosity and learning by showing me different worlds. Words cannot express my gratitude to my grandparents Willie and Birdie Smith who, because of their ingenuity, generosity, and tenacity, are exemplary human beings. Geoff Sorrick, my best friend and husband, has provided patience, humor, and insights at the exact right times. I am indebted to him and Smithson Sorrick for teaching me the meaning of dedication and perseverance.

Introduction

T

he colors of the photograph have faded, but the details are easy to discern. It is a close-up of my mother’s face, taken sometime in the early years of the 1970s. I imagine it is standard fare for the time: she stands beneath, or perhaps in front of, a hanging fern, gazing outside the frame with a serious expression that has not a hint of sternness. I feel now, as I did when I was child, that my mom looks ultra chic, a vision of glamour in the 1970s.1 Over the years, my understanding of the image has shifted. After her death twenty years ago, I could barely look at the photograph because it pained me to think of my own loss. Years later now, I display it on my dresser and look at it often. I think of how alike we look, although my features are softer and fuller. I think about strange coincidences in fashion—that the stark blond streaks I have in my otherwise dark brown hair are similar to those she had in her similarly dark brown hair. Sometimes, I try to reconstruct the moment. They are musings akin to plotting the points of a constellation, neither perfectly symmetrical nor linear: I must have been around two-years-old. Predivorce: my parents were still together, but were they getting along? We were living near my paternal grandparents. She, therefore

we, had limited contact with her family. How’d she feel about that? In these daydreams, I am always the diving-off point—it is my movie after all—but, it doesn’t take long before I reach the sketchy terrain where my knowledge runs out, family lore picks up, and conjecture grows. In the last couple of years, the photograph has led me to question what my mom thought about race and identity at the time because, in it, she looks black. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that she is acting black in the image. Whatever the case, I am forced to answer questions by piecing together different kinds of information. The facts as I know them: she was a white woman married to a black man, and she had a black child. Mostly estranged from her own family, she was largely embraced by those of her husband’s family. Her hair is styled in a curly Afro, so she must have permed her normally loosely waved hair to get it to radiate frizzily around her face. Her skin looks light brown, but should this be attributed to the shoddy chemistry of color photography in the 1970s, or to her olivecolored skin that, during the summer, she kept darkly tanned? The next series of inquiries goes to the making of the photograph. I know it was my father who triggered the camera, but is the image the result of collaboration between husband and wife? Did she direct the composition, or did he? Was he claiming her for his race and as his family, was she asserting her identification with him, their daughter, and her new family, or was she merely appropriating then-stylish signs of blackness? In other words, whose vision was this, and who is responsible for this depiction? Were the sitter and author self-consciously employing signs and signifiers of blackness? Apparently, I am not the only one to be confused when reading the signs my mother manipulated in relation to her phenotype. Indeed, one of my aunt’s favorite stories about my mother pertains to this very topic. Rather than attending a historically black college, my aunt opted to stay near her family and attend the local university. Her one effort to approximate the all-black setting of an HBCU was to live in an all-black dorm on the mostly white campus. My mother visited my aunt often, and on one such visit, one of my aunt’s dormmates announced my mom’s arrival by saying, “Your sister-in-law, that black girl who’s trying to pass for white, is here.” My aunt tells me that she tried to set the record straight, to inform her dormmate that she knew for sure that her sister-in-law was really white because she had seen her family. But, the other young woman’s opinion was not swayed.

Invariably, my aunt and I get a good laugh out of this story. Her laughter registers on two levels: first, because of the ridiculousness of the dormmate interpreting her white sister-in-law as black, and second, because it demonstrates to her, as it would to many black people, that white isn’t nearly as “pure” and self-explanatory as it is represented to be. I find the story funny because, in my mind, my aunt’s dormmate was right on one account and wrong on another: my mother probably was performing blackness and maybe even trying to pass—not for white, but for black. And, given her circumstances, that’s not entirely unreasonable. Lately, that image of my mother has become for viewers (who are almost always my friends) either a litmus test of how they understand race and interpret my racial identity or a screen on to which to project identity concerns. Upon seeing the photograph, one Latina friend remarked, “Wow, you actually look like her!” Her comment suggests that she interpreted my mother’s racial identity as white. Yet, despite the fact that she has never laid eyes on either of my parents, she determined, likely by the color of my skin, that there was no way I could look like my mother (because she’s white) and that I had to look like my father (because he’s black). Another friend, who, like her parents, self-identifies as African American, lamented, “Damn, she’s not even black, and she looks blacker than I do!” Buried at the heart of that reaction is a mixture of envy, wistfulness, and admiration that the white woman in the photograph could carry off blackness more successfully than this friend feels she does. Yet another friend, who studies skin color, stated matter-of-factly, “She looks black. I wouldn’t even think she was white.” This judgment was issued in the course of a conversation in which she railed against mixed-race academics who, she says, privilege their proximity to whiteness by studying pictures of their white mothers; it was, without a doubt, an admonishment to this black mixedrace author not to do the same. My memory of my mother as a shapeshifter who adapted effortlessly to, and was accepted readily into, different settings seems to be corroborated by the interpretations of the figure in the photograph. More than that, the anecdotes related here—­involving exchanges between an actor who puts identity-signs into play and audience members who read those signs independently—illustrate many of the complexities of identity tackled in this book. Enacting Others takes as its objective the historicization of the politics of identity, with particular emphasis on considering the ways that art made in the last four decades engages with and, in turn, affects discourses Introduction

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of identity. It assumes that identity is a platform from which one structures one’s political views and affiliations, a point around which one forms and maintains social relationships, and a place from which one creates and consumes cultural products, yet it does not seek to reinscribe the need for, or critique the existence of, the politics of identity. Instead I plot the trajectory of the discourse by examining what W. E. B. Du Bois designated “the problem of the Twentieth Century”—“the problem of the colorline”—and by focusing on four women artists who deliberately crossed the “colorline” and other identity-defining boundaries.2 My interest in performances that trespass the limits of identity lies not in their specifics, but in their modes of operation: especially, how signs (ranging from clothing to behavior to phenotype) are manipulated to negotiate identity. As such, the book is concerned with racial identity and how it is represented, performed, signified, and embodied in recent American art. It centers on works that appropriate and negotiate blackness, but it also contemplates, on a philosophical level, the manufacture, performance, representation, and maintenance of class, ethnic, gender, race, and sexual identity as well as how identity positions affect others. Is identity constant or shifting? Does one decide one’s own identity, or is it applied from outside? Is identity biologically determined, socially constructed, or performative, and what is the role of the audience in the process? In exploring those queries, I focus on works by Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee in which each temporarily crosses the boundaries of class, ethnicity, gender, and race to perform as an other. One might say, in the simplest and crudest terms, that Piper goes from black to blacker in the Mythic Being (1973–75), Antin goes from white to black in Being Antinova (1981), Smith goes from black to everything in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993 and 2000), and Lee goes from yellow to white, black, and brown in her Projects (1997–2001). Yet, these works and their meanings cannot be explained away so easily: they present and represent important concatenations of class, ethnicity, gender, and race wherein identity categories, which we sometimes prefer to think of as exclusive, actually deepen and involve themselves with one another.3 In that respect, the performances lead one to ponder how the artists’ fictional identity positions affect their own. Can someone who is African American, like Adrian Piper, get “blacker” by performing different gender and class positions? Can a person’s experience of her own gender and

ethnicity (in this example, Jewish) change by temporarily becoming black and adopting a different profession, as in Eleanor Antin’s case? Does Anna Deavere Smith’s gender enable her to embody other genders, races, classes, and professions, and does her blackness disappear as an identifier when she mounts her one-woman shows? And, do Nikki S. Lee’s nationality and ethno-racial designation collude with her gender to facilitate racial mutability and her ability to be “other”? After all, what is it about the racial and social category of blackness that renders it available to such various uses? This book studies how Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith address, or perhaps redress, the stifling boundaries of identity categories as a way to explore how the politics of identity discourse has shaped the manner in which identity is theorized, understood, experienced, and, subsequently represented in art. The works considered and questions posed here concentrate attention on how identification has been negotiated as a way to map the coordinates of the politics of identity and the discourse’s impact on recent American art.

The Politics of Identity and Art? The performances under discussion are predicated on the idea that identity is political and that a politics of identity exists. Though some scholars use the terms interchangeably, I prefer the phrase “politics of identity” over the more contentious “identity politics.”4 The former suggests a larger discursive movement which prioritizes the idea and addresses the myriad ways that identity is a valid and significant platform from which to motivate political action and to create and consume cultural products. The former phrase also skirts the negative associations that have been lodged against the latter as a tactic of neutralization and disempowerment. In considering works by Piper, Antin, Smith, and Lee that openly engage, manipulate, and negotiate identity and its trappings, this book reflects on significant moments in, and key aspects of, the amorphous and constantly revised discourse that is the politics of identity. It is generally understood that the politics of identity was assembled around blackness in the 1950s and 1960s during the black freedom struggle—though identity has been, and continues to be, a site around which other groups locate political action.5 The politics of identity is said to have come about as a result of civil rights workers’ emphasis on the

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similarities of the experiences of black Americans: a shared history of enslavement which produced systematic and institutional disenfranchisement, discrimination, and domination. Activists created a sense of community by urging disparate groups to unite against historical oppression. They showed individuals, who might have assumed that their experiences of oppression were personal, that their experiences were, in fact, shared and systemic. This was achieved, in part, through consciousness-raising exercises: individuals shared their personal experiences with larger groups which, in turn, enabled people to realize that their mutual exploitation and marginalization was predicated on their shared physical and cultural traits and historic and social experiences. Grassroots and national organizations also participated in this identity building and community making by prioritizing economic, political, and social issues and launching public relations campaigns that fostered identification. In this way, identity became a political position around which communities were built and individuals were mobilized to act for the benefit of the larger group. United around particular identity attributes, these newly politicized communities struggled for social and political empowerment and equality, and they argued for a redistribution of wealth. At the same time, they called for recognition of their idiosyncratic experiences, predicating the representation of their culture in the manner in which they saw fit. In other words, they sought control of how their identities and experiences were portrayed.6 This book showcases four such artist-agents, women who produced works that shaped identity at pivotal moments of discursive instability, revision, and refinement. Consequently, each of them articulated innovative approaches to identity formation and negotiation. Piper’s Mythic Being series (1973–75) was created after the civil rights movement and just as the strategies of the black freedom struggle were being adapted and redeployed by the women’s rights movement, black power movement, American Indian movement, Chicano movement, yellow power movement, and gay rights movement. Piper enacted her fictional male persona and took him to the streets at the same time that affirmative action programs were being put in place as a result of Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to counterbalance historic inequities that gave minoritarian groups increased access to education and a foothold (limited as it was) in the marketplace. The series was launched when it became difficult to discern whether the splintering of individuals into groups was a matter of political action or a

product of essentialism based on biological determinants and cultural affiliation. Antin mounted the performances of her make-believe black ballerina, Eleanora Antinova, (performed intermittently between 1979 and 1987) just as the women’s rights movement was being fragmented and nuanced by the work of lesbians and women of color and at the same time that the notion of universalism, which says that an idea or object will be received and understood the same way by a rational Everyman (or “universal” subject) who is without class, ethnic, gender, racial, and national affiliation, was being overthrown. Antin’s Antinova was exposing her centrality to crucial episodes in early twentieth-century avant-garde art when the universal subject—once imagined as a supremely neutral being—was revealed to be white, heterosexual, upper class, Christian, and male. Antinova takes off when the discourse of multiculturalism encouraged both the decentering of hegemonic voices and the admission and democratization of subject positions previously deemed marginal. Staged at the height and denouement of multiculturalism, Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) also coincides with the critical attack on the essentialism that was thought to motivate “identity politics.” Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 overlaps with the critique of essentialism and “identity politics” by scholars such as Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, who argue that 1) one aspect of identity is emphasized to the detriment of others which, in turn, excludes nonindoctrinated people; 2) the prioritized identity that is represented as “natural” and essential can, ironically, reinforce marginalization, exploitation, and oppression; 3) group identity is prioritized over individual identity; and 4) all of which have xenophobic tendencies that can potentially lead to actions ranging from nationalism to separatism to ethnic cleansing and pogroms. Smith’s 2000 film Twilight: Los Angeles, featuring a series of reenactments from the earlier play, puts her alternating occupation of multiple identity positions (including her own) front and center; it provides a site from which to explore the claim that “identity politics” is detrimental to class-based equality because it is an ideology that fosters self-interest and does not account for the multiple identity positions that individuals occupy at once.7 In the same way that Piper’s, Antin’s, and Smith’s projects intersected with critical discursive moments, Nikki S. Lee’s Project series (1997–2001) was undertaken at the turn of this century, during the backlash against

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“identity politics” which had come to be regarded as an artistic mind-set that was divisive, hackneyed, and ultimately passé. Lee’s infiltration of communities of San Francisco skateboarders, New York senior citizens, Bronx hip-hop devotees, and Wall Street yuppies overlaps with the rise of postidentity and colorblindness—discourses that masquerade as liberalhumanist yet effect a conservative plan that effaces class, gender, ethnic, racial and other differences as if historic domination and power imbalances have already been resolved. These discourses supposedly supplant “identity politics” with a new “universal” humanism.8 Lee penetrated various subcultural communities at the moment when “identity politics” was labeled anti-integrationist, separatist, and isolationist, and when measures against affirmative action, sanctions against immigrants and immigration, and restrictions against same-sex couples were enacted. Likewise, her forays into subgroups that some might term particularistic and isolated have occurred precisely when people who, at an earlier time, might have collected under the identity categories of “feminist” or “African American” now claim a fierce political and cultural individualism wherein they stress their right to make decisions that benefit their personal circumstances.9 While the phrase “identity politics art” seems to have been coined as recently as the 1980s, art that politicizes, performs, negotiates, and substantiates a particular identity, like the work of Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith, is by no means a recent development. Indeed, the twentieth century is rife with instances of art that makes identity a political and cultural platform. American and African American10 modernists are well-documented examples of artists who understood identity as a pragmatic and valuable tool in reaching political and cultural objectives. That such historic uses of one’s cultural, national, ethnic, and racial identity have been termed “cultural nationalism” and not “identity politics” is instructive: the former term suggests a cultural exceptionalism that is safe and acceptable, while the latter implies a treacherous separatism. I would argue, however, that the art and ideas of early twentieth-century American moderns reveal a sophisticated understanding of the politics of identity, and even if the artists studied in this book do not announce a self-conscious interest in the politics of identity, their works also engage with, and participate in, the discourse by deftly exploring the negotiation of identity, the boundaries between individual identity and group identification, and the intersection of various identifications.

Foundational Identities The idea that identity represents the essential nature or character of a person and that it is maintained consistently over space and time came under attack in the late 1970s and early 1980s when poststructuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault posited identity as defined by sets of linguistic signs and social ideologies.11 They determined that individual identity was formed by discourse and culture, and not by some innate, natural, or divine intervention. Perhaps the most salient argument against “essentialist” conceptions of identity comes from Judith Butler. Her theory of performativity suggests that identity is a “series of repetitive acts” and socially mandated behaviors that an individual is forced to perform continually in order to take on and maintain a particular identity.12 At issue in various theories, however, is whether identity is natural (essential/authentic) or constructed (culturally/­socially); how much or little power one has in the creation of one’s identity; and whether identity is consistent or changeable.13 Piper’s, Antin’s, Smith’s, and Lee’s projects are productive locations that offer ample opportunities to explore these significant and complex issues because their performances simultaneously trample and reify these conceptions of identity. Notwithstanding the fact that identity categories are applied to individuals externally, categorically, and without their consent by members of the dominant or majority group, individuals constitute their own identifications or self-identify in several ways. They may be grouped around physical, phenotypic, and anatomical similarities; by historical and systematic marginalization, exploitation, and oppression; by social movements, social events, geographic and national regions, according to intellectual and cultural interests, or in terms of political issues.14 Sometimes identification develops on a grassroots level by like-minded, like-looking, or likeacting people.15 Traditionally, individuals gather under large identifying headings, such as “woman,” “black,” “Latino,” and “gay” to build communities, struggle against suppression, achieve economic and social parity with dominant groups, take charge of cultural self-representation, and gain political power through representation. Taking into account the many ways that and reasons why individuals align themselves with certain identities, there are theorists, sociologist Stuart Hall chief among them, who have discounted the singularity connoted by the word “identity” because it forecloses the possibility of mulIntroduction

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tiple identificatory positions. Hall advocates use of “identification” over “identity” to signify that self-definition is constantly in flux, that one identifies in multiple ways simultaneously, and that identifications are prioritized differently at any given moment.16 The boundary-crossing performances of Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith demonstrate a constant reorganization, reprioritization, and rearticulation of their makers’ identifications. All identifications, as Stuart Hall explains in his essay “New Ethnicities,” are structured around a “binary system of representation [that] constantly marks and attempts to fix and naturalize the difference between belongingness and otherness,” to demarcate “selves we either are or are not.”17 The foundational doubling that structures all identification is detraction/ attraction and rejection/envy. In other words, an “other” is needed against which to define oneself as well as to create desire.18 As a result, identifications can, at any given moment, be one or all of the following: a viable political entity that, because of sheer numbers, can leverage social change; a safe haven wherein members have an imagined or actual community; an essentialist prison wherein members are expected to be and act the same; and a club that excludes individuals based on difference. The works of Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith studied here present a series of dichotomies that seem to challenge the notions that identity is constructed on stable binaries (such as black/white and male/female), that it is singular and fixed, and that authenticity roots or grounds identity categories (blackness, whiteness, masculine, feminine). Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith enact boundary crossings—such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag—that emphasize (and derive their excitement from) the arbitrariness, constructedness, and fluidity of identity and identifications. In reality, various kinds of boundary-crossing performances happen all the time: recent and sensationalized examples of identityshifters include literary critic Anatole Broyard’s move from black to white, Rock Hudson’s embodiment of a mythic heterosexuality in films, secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s (unintentional) performance of Catholicism to cover her Jewish heritage, and Britney Spears’s movement between uncultured “white trash” and sophisticated, rich pop diva.19 Still, among various identities, American blackness has the distinction of being both vacant and occupied, available for use precisely because it seems so thoroughly understood and known. “Black,” like its supposed

opposite “white,” is imbued with a set of foundational narratives and essential characteristics that, despite their elasticity, lend the category a sense of history, stability, wholeness, and authenticity.20 Knowledge and correct usage of the narratives and signs of blackness function as a passkey that admits or excludes individuals. Authentic blackness, for example, has been aligned variously with nostalgic notions of Southern plantation culture in the late nineteenth century; with Southern rural, poor folk culture in the first decades of the twentieth century; and, in the final decades of that century, with urban blight and poverty.21 Despite its shifting lines of definition, blackness continues to be associated with emotionality, the body, urban culture, the primitive, overt sexuality, poverty, and heterosexist masculinity. The racial category of whiteness, by contrast, presents itself as ordinary, normal, and decidedly unraced. Working in myriad ways to normalize white entitlement and black disempowerment, essential whiteness, Richard Dyer suggests, is embodied in figures like the ballerina and the action hero, which are assigned attributes that characterize them as pure, talented, and ephemeral or powerful, ethical, and neutral, respectively.22 Nonwhites are represented as being “raced” at the same time that they are assigned a variety of negative attributes that predicate their disenfranchisement. Whiteness represents and perpetuates itself in cultural products and socio-political, economic, and legal systems as decidedly unraced and normative through various narrative, structural, and semiotic ­strategies. Separating black people from blackness is crucial, E. Patrick Johnson explains in Appropriating Blackness, because blackness is a trope that individuals appropriate to their own ends.23 He is careful to point out that, due to historic power imbalances, there are significant differences in the ways that black and white individuals appropriate blackness as well as in the services it is meant to perform—that is, what it is supposed to do for each group. However, it is important that while blackness is a trope with which many play, being and living black carries with it material, political, and economic consequences. The same can be said of whiteness: white people and whiteness are not one and the same. Rather, whiteness is an ideologically and culturally constructed trope that is endowed with real world consequences: those who don the cloak of whiteness assume the mantle of entitlement and power.

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Performing Identity Playing with and inhabiting blackness—not to mention its appeal to audiences—is ubiquitous. Witness these recent instances: Eddie Murphy’s racial and gender masquerades in Norbit (2007), The Nutty Professor (1996), and Coming to America (1988); Chuck Knipp’s transformation into the African American “welfare mother” Shirley Q. Liquor in his stand-up routines;24 Dave Chappelle’s performances of assorted black characters on his self-titled Comedy Central television program; Anthony Hopkins’s role as Coleman Silk, the black-turned-Jewish protagonist of Philip Roth’s book and Robert Benton’s film The Human Stain (2000 and 2003);25 Angelina Jolie’s part as Mariane Pearl, the mixed-race journalist and widow of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in the film A Mighty Heart (2007);26 and Tyler Perry’s performances as the black Southern matriarch Madea in plays and films. However, thinking of these performances merely in terms of their play with blackness does them a disservice, for their complexity resides at the crossroads where blackness meets gender, class, and other identity positions. In other words, blackness cannot be separated from race, class, religion, sexual orientation, or any other identification because each identity position shades, inflects, and deepens the others. Considering artists’ and audiences’ investment in the fixity of identity boundaries is vital to understanding knotty performances like Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, Smith’s and those listed above. Likewise, recognizing that such identity plays are part of a long tradition is useful. This book contributes to the growing body of literature on identity performance, including racial passing, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag due to its focus on artists who engage in persona-play performances and shift from their own gender, as well as ethnic, class, and racial designations to those of others.27 These identity-switching masquerades cast light on the sticky intersection of identity and performance as well as on the works’ complicated relations to these rich performative practices. The narratives and actions constituting Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s performances rely on racial passing, a form of ethnic impersonation and identity transformation that has occurred in the American context for at least as long as people of African descent have had sexual unions with those of European descent and the latter have oppressed the former. Traditionally understood to be enacted when people who are legally black,

yet possess a fair complexion, choose to live, or “pass,” as white, passing is grounded in two related assumptions: first, that whiteness and blackness are “authentic,” stable, impenetrable categories; and second, that an individual in one category could not possibly fit into the other because of the fixity of ethnic signifiers, including but not limited to culture and phenotype.28 Individuals are said to pass in order to assume the privileges that members of the majority culture enjoy. Little wonder, then, that class, gender, religious, and sexual passing are also prevalent in the American context. Although passing intersects with many issues—identity formation, legal standings and definitions, and psychology among them—it remains, above all, a matter of representation, appearance, and visibility. To pass successfully, one must suppress one’s difference from, and perform the behaviors of, members of the dominant culture in order to appear like them. The works studied here demonstrate the tautology that underlies passing. On the one hand, the four artists’ racial performances seem to reveal identity categories to be less fixed than they appear, which, in turn, seems to free individuals to switch categories. The artists suggest that an individual may choose to jump ship and pass into another identity, thereby seizing the power to choose how she wants to represent her own cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, and sexual identity. Their performances, however, also suggest that jumping ship, even temporarily, does not altogether free an individual from the binds of identity. It is a matter of Althusserian interpellation: the cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, and sexual majorities allow an individual to believe she has the power to decide how she may identify and call herself when, in reality, the majority has mandated the identities from which she can choose, thereby reinscribing its own normative and powerful position and deepening the divisions between identities.29 While the artists’ racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundary crossings draw on the passing phenomenon, they are not instances of passing, for the performances do not result in a wholesale shift in identity that “passers” are said to enact. Indeed, Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith are decidedly and determinedly unsuccessful at passing. By reading carefully the visual and textual remains of their performances, we can be certain that their bodies were never subsumed by those of their characters, that their costumes were selected to draw attention to their impersonations, and that the behaviors they performed were purposely exaggerated. As we shall

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see, the ways in which these artists represented identity have significant consequences in terms of both how they construct their alternate personae and how they are received and interpreted by audiences. Smith’s, Piper’s, Antin’s, and Lee’s performances also relate profoundly to the American traditions of blackface minstrelsy, another form of ethnic impersonation and identity transformation based on exaggerated notions of blackness, in which white male actors “blackened up” by applying burnt cork or greasepaint to their skin. Minstrelsy depended on and perpetuated an exaggerated blackness that was, at turns, debased, threatening, humble, and virile.30 Eric Lott’s book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class shows how blackface minstrels “attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed.”31 He argues that (white) blackface minstrel shows allowed white performers to shirk their middle-class mores and live la vie boheme by temporarily assuming hyperbolic representations of blackness.32 They also provided the opportunity for white working-class audiences to define their own collective identity in opposition to that of the upper classes for whom they worked as well as to that of the black masses with whom they competed for work.33 In short, black bodies and black culture were the currency that white minstrel performers and their audiences exchanged in order to define their own masculinity, class identity, and racial superiority. That minstrelsy contributed to the trade in, and consumption of, black bodies and black culture is evident in Smith’s, Piper’s, Lee’s, and Antin’s performances; they too employed blackness to make meaning and to negotiate aspects of their identities. Black minstrelsy got its start later than white minstrelsy, around the mid-nineteenth century. Like their white counterparts, black minstrel players applied burnt cork or greasepaint to achieve the “darkened-up” appearance that was the norm for the genre, and they enacted the same stock characters that peopled the earlier minstrel shows. Stage bills marketed black minstrels as “authentic” and “real,” sidestepping the fact that the characters played by both white and black minstrels were fantastic overstatements. White audiences were moved to watch black performers under the notion that they would act more “naturally” and “spontaneously” than their white counterparts.34 By the beginning of the twentieth century, black minstrelsy had begun to change. Performers like Bert Williams took up the minstrel mask in an attempt to reclaim the stereotypical characters and assign them different, positive attributes.35 But this appropria-

tion had limited success. While Williams became the most popular black entertainer of the first two decades of the twentieth century, he seemed to be subsumed by the mask that New Negro intelligentsia castigated: what they perceived to be his reinscription of pejorative stereotypes of blackness. Considering Piper’s, Antin’s, Smith’s, and Lee’s relationship to historic blackface practices also allows us to examine the potential such actions have in marking the line between black people and blackness. In addition to the American traditions of passing and minstrelsy, the performances discussed here are intimately connected to the phenomena of cross-dressing and drag. Cross-dressing and drag, like passing and minstrelsy, are undergirded by two principles: first, both gender and sexual identity are composed of polar opposites (male/female and heterosexual/ homosexual), and second, each category is intractable, impermeable, and inflexible. I rely on Marjorie Garber’s definition of cross-dressing, which goes beyond the popular understanding of a man wearing women’s clothing and instead includes any type of crossing of identity boundaries, whether ethnic, class, religious, sexual, or otherwise. One of the goals of the cross-dresser is to pass temporarily as or for the assumed identity. If, as Garber argues, cross-dressing has the potential to “introduce crisis” to the idea of a whole and integral identity, then Piper’s, Antin’s, Lee’s, and Smith’s works, which bank on cross-dressing, are also capable of critiquing “binary thinking, whether particularized as male and female, black and white, yes and no, Republican and Democrat, self and other, and in any other way.”36 Drag is similar to cross-dressing in that it involves an individual wearing the clothing and acting out the behaviors of another. In contrast to the cross-dresser, the drag artist does not aim to pass as the assumed identity. Rather, drag relies on the camp factor to amplify gender conventions in a parodic way that calls attention to the “artifice, exaggeration” and “stylization” of gender and other identities.37 Camp is characterized by incongruity and humor, and it delights in “things-being-what-they-are-not.”38 Emphasizing theatricality and aestheticization, camp understands deeply “Being– as-Playing-a-Role” and “the metaphor of life as theater.”39 Camp’s stock in trade is flipping scripts, juxtaposing and inverting unlike signs, narratives, and ideologies. The performances of Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith suggest that they all devoured camp’s lesson to drag because, in differing degrees, they highlight the simulacral, relish overstatement, and draw attention to the performative attributes of identity. Introduction

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These identity masquerades—whether passing, cross-dressing, minstrelsy, or drag—are characterized by a frisson that is based in the actors’ and audiences’ investment in the fixity of identity categories, just as the rigid boundaries of identity categories are maintained through the threat of danger and the humor of the implausible. Passing and cross-dressing are exuberant to experience and to witness precisely because they are risky business: individuals have suffered financial and social ruin and lost life and limb by flaunting the permeability of identity boundaries and displaying cracks in the power structure. Likewise, minstrelsy and drag incite violent reactions because their exaggeration and artificiality show the humor of a world turned upside-down that is, nevertheless, unlikely to upset social contracts (whether institutional or ideological) surrounding identity. While Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s performances are akin to these identity performances, each has an idiosyncratic relationship to power structures. Each circumnavigates the institutional barriers that police identity, yet where one emphasizes individual agency, another enforces hegemonic divisions. For that reason, the role that power plays in the boundary crossings mentioned above and in the identity-switching performances outlined in the works studied here should not be underestimated. Whereas passing and cross-dressing are oftentimes understood as acts of intervention in which power is appropriated or balanced, drag and minstrelsy are frequently interpreted as reinscriptions of power differentials and domination. In this understanding, drag and minstrel performers dress as their “opposite” to dramatize their difference from, and power over, those they find threatening. Peggy Phelan, for instance, asserts that “a man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to him.”40 He performs her image “externally and hyperbolically because he wants to see himself in possession of her” and “to dramatize himself as ‘all’.”41 Phelan’s analysis that drag “does not and cannot reproduce ‘woman’” but that “it re-enacts . . . the performance of the phallic function—marking her as his” can be extended to minstrelsy: the player is, likewise, trying to own the raced individuals he or she both loves and hates.42 Thus, in addition to sharing with drag, minstrelsy, passing, and cross-dressing the ability to show the arbitrariness and constructedness of identity, the four artists’ performances also alternate between empowering and subordinating the artist, the audience, and the enacted group. If passing, blackface minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag are defining

presences in the works studied here, they are also defining absences. Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith are not drag artists or present-day minstrels because they do not partake in gross exaggeration nor do they seek to pass as or for their adopted personae by suppressing or masking their “true” selves. Yet, their performances engage with aspects of those performance traditions in ways that are both stimulating and troubling. Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s performances labor toward a humanist utopia in which identity boundaries and hierarchies will be leveled; they promise to benefit larger communities by disrupting the separatist and discriminatory status quo. In that respect, the performances appear to be community minded.43 They allow the artists to explore the constructedness and fluidity of identity and toy with how it is represented. The pieces have the potential to intervene in ideologies that maintain identificatory separateness, challenge the civic, social, economic, and legal inequities assigned to minority populations, and test the arbitrary privilege that the majoritarian groups (such as whites, men, and heterosexuals) are granted. Perhaps most importantly, they valorize being self and other simultaneously while modeling this idealized behavior for their audiences. Far from agonizing over their boundary crossings, the artists seem to delight in the disjuncture between their own and their assumed identities because the performances enable, from a sensuous viewpoint, the embodiment of new identities—a practice that is exciting and invigorating. Indeed, my research suggests, as do the majority of passing narratives, that these four artists’ performances were largely solitary affairs and that the greatest impact was realized in each artist’s private, intellectual, and psychic life. Enacting “others” allowed them to expand themselves and their own subjectivities. The performances instantiate and underscore the friction that often exists between individual and group identity, between personal agency and community empowerment, and between the private and the public spheres.

Bodies That Matter? Performance, Identity, and Lived Experience So far, this introduction has discussed identity and the politics surrounding it in ways that are largely philosophical and discursive, without regard for how identity is lived by and in individual bodies. Yet, Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s performances hint at some of the limitations of reIntroduction

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cent theorizations of identity in that the body is left out of the equation altogether. While I understand the expediency of disavowing biological determinism, I question the continued exclusion of bodies and bodily experiences from discourses of identity. This book seeks to redress, in some small measure, what is a significant oversight in discussions of identity. It aims to integrate an analysis of bodily experience into discussions of difference not as a separatist tactic but as a way to account for how difference is lived. That the artists not only think about and represent different identities but enact them physically is one of the most significant aspects of the works studied here. These are performances after all, and as such, they implicate the artists’ real, flesh-and-blood bodies (and by extension, those of audience members) in ways that other artistic media do not. For that reason, the pieces mandate the phenomenologically oriented approach I take here: in these works, the body and its experiences matter. That Piper, Antin, Smith, and Lee employed the genre of performance and the medium of their own physical bodies is politically and materially significant. The body is the container of identifications, the screen on which identity is projected, the mechanism through which identity is acted out, and the object that experiences identity. In the case of the artists studied here, recall that their bodies bear visible signs of some of their identifications, markings that denote “otherness” due to gender, ethnicity, and race. Their use of their own bodies emphasizes the facts that the body is the site on which identity and identification are based and is the medium through which it is experienced. That the body is the locus of anxiety around which fear of difference aggregates (expressed variously from stereotypes to discrimination to pogroms) is highlighted in their performances. The artists’ creations intervene, then, in the working of several ideological machines—that identity is composed of polar opposites, that the boundaries between identities are impenetrable, and that identity is socially constructed, among them—at the same time that they drive home the material consequences of such ideologies. These performances put the artists on the line; their bodies are the objects that disrupt the smooth running of the ideological cogs. Moreover, the performances instantiate figurative and phenomenological substitution. That is, the performances allow audiences to imagine stepping, not into another’s shoes, but into another’s body: audience members are encouraged to envisage and embrace a different embodiment through the artists’ switching of identities. In that way, the performances model

for audiences the liminal space of being self and other simultaneously. The concept of a liminal space of simultaneous selfhood and otherness is, on one hand, a high-minded and utopian idea, promising “we will all just get along” by knowing the “other” like we know ourselves. On the other hand, that conception functions to whitewash difference and smooth over the continued social, economic, and political imbalances that result from physical, ethnic, gender, racial, class, sexual, and national disparity. The liminality proffered in the performances reads as a leftist, humanist, integrationist fantasy that shades toward the neoconservative projects of colorblindness and postidentity.

Identity, Performance, and Audience Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s works are more than just performances of various fictional and real identities; they are also performances of identity wherein the exigencies of identity are contemplated. Butler’s theory of performativity, which posits identity as a set of socially mandated behaviors and actions that individuals perform in order to take on and maintain a particular identity, functions as the skeletal structure of the pieces.44 Intellectually and philosophically demanding, the performances go beyond emphasizing the performativity of identity: they enact performances of performances. Their embodiments enable one to see that movements, behaviors, language, and signs are not “natural” parts of identity but learned actions and performances. Each of these artists’ actions are learned from, and, in turn, performed for, various audiences. And each work has an imaginary (or perhaps, intended) and an actual audience, that is, an ideal audience who the artist imagined would see the performance and a real audience who actually encountered it. This book grapples with the artists’ various audiences (real and intended) in an effort to understand the performances’ relationships to identity-formation and the politics of identity. It is evident that each artist has a unique relationship to her audience, but one thing is common to each work: audience is inseparable from, and tantamount in consequence to, the role identity plays in the performances because identity-formation and negotiation require an audience (whether real or imaginary). Indeed, these artists seem to understand implicitly the important role that the audience plays in giving affirmation and taking direction. Moreover, that the works are produced with the artists’ bodies Introduction

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highlights an important dichotomy: because of the primacy of the body in the performances, identity discourses that emphasize the biological, natural, authentic, and essential are reinforced. At the same time, because the artists commute between identity positions, the works emphasize the instability of identity and reify the determination that identity is socially produced and performatively based. The works seem to confirm an unlikely equation: identity is the sum of its parts of fiction, reality, and performance. Identity is as fixed as it is fluid, and it is no more “real” than it is constructed. The performances seem to prove that identity is lived and experienced between the “real,” the “fiction,” and the performance. My research suggests, furthermore, that audience is important for providing the artist with knowledge that her assumed identity works. Piper, Antin, Smith, and Lee took up ready-made and exaggerated representations of identity (in the form of visual signs, phenotypical markers, and symbolic narratives) to attempt to ensure that the audience interpreted correctly the signs that the artists manipulated. Some, like Seyla Benhabib, might term these ready-made signs and narratives “iconographies” and their products “icons.” She describes the iconographic process as the “tendency . . . to reduce the individual to a type, an icon of a position, movement, idea, or perspective,” a “hollow[ing] out [of] the opacity and mystery of our inner beings.”45 Others, such as Richard Dyer and Josephine Lee, term these ready-made images and stories “stereotypes,” that is, overdetermined representations accompanied by preexisting narratives based on factors, such as physical features, cultural practices, clothing choices, speech, bodily gestures, and other qualities that constitute identity.46 Although stereotypes are not inherently wrong, they are, nonetheless, “the product of a historical relation of power” in which “violent dismemberment,” by way of the intensification and exaggeration of ethnic signifiers and phenotypic marks, such as hair, noses, and eyes, occurs.47 I take my cues from Josephine Lee who, in her book Performing Asian America (1997), focuses not just on the stereotype’s power components but also on the violence it wreaks on bodies, even while it attempts to “preserve the fantasy of the oppressor’s self as unified, coherent, orderly, and rational.”48 Even for individuals who are misrepresented by them, stereotypes are seductive because of their power, overdeterminedness, and excess, so it is not uncommon for artists belonging to minoritized groups, like those studied here, to appropriate and enact stereotypes in their work. However, flipping the stereotype’s script is a difficult endeavor: as Josephine

Lee says, an artist “must highlight or foreground the anxiety inherent in the performance of the stereotype by overperforming its already exaggerated qualities, pushing violence into hyperbolic slapstick, or forcing its repetition until it becomes monotonous.”49 In order for performances like Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s to critique stereotypes, they must overperform exaggerated iconographies in order to emphasize how they flatten out and circumscribe the individuals they represent. The taking on, enacting of, and acting out of slippery and complicated icons with one’s own flesh-and-blood body is worthwhile work because it has the potential, for practitioner as well as audience, to bring into focus the danger of dismemberment. This labor is treacherous, for it threatens to reinforce iconographies already in place. The issue of corporeal materiality becomes paramount: what happens when iconographies or stereotypes of identity are given physical form and enacted in, on, and by the bodies of artists? Are the iconographies dismantled or reified, and what is the role of the audience in this process? How would the audience read the artists’ assumed identities if ready-made iconographies were not employed? Smith’s, Piper’s, Lee’s, and Antin’s performances show us how audiences participate in the making, taking, and ratifying of the identity that is being created and assumed because understanding the audiences’ participation is crucial to the study of identity formation and negotiation.

Core Samples: Approach and Medium The works discussed in this book straddle various categories within performance and thus demand different approaches. Piper’s Mythic Being, for example, might logically be placed in the street performance genre because many of its actions took place in public settings, that is, the streets of New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Antin’s Eleanora Antinova also qualifies as a street performance because it happened on the streets of New York, but it could also be termed life performance because Antin lived for three weeks as her assumed identity or it could even be considered theatrical performance because she staged shows for audiences. Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) was a theatrical performance that was produced on several stages during its run. Twilight: Los Angeles (2000) was produced on a closed soundstage, without an audience, and for a film crew, so it is better termed a film rather than a theatrical performance. Lee’s Projects Introduction

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might be called street performance because her actions often took place in public settings in New York City, but it may be more accurately called a private performance because the artist places a premium on the resulting photographs rather than on the actual performance experience. At the same time, one would be hard pressed to get the four featured artists to identify themselves as “performance artists.”50 Piper would likely call herself a conceptual artist, Antin a postconceptualist, and Lee a conceptualist, whereas Smith would likely label herself actor and playwright. My classification of the works as performance is separate from how the artists define their works and themselves, but the consideration of artistic intent (always a slippery concept) does play a part: that is, I take into account what the artist imagined the art object to be. It is clear, for instance, that both Piper and Antin intended their performances to be art objects. Yet, they each understood and accounted for the ephemerality of the performances by making photographs of the actions that function as objects in their own right, beyond the completedness or pastness of their performances. For Smith, the performance (whether acted on an open or closed stage) is the art object in these theatrical productions, and the remaining photographs and video-recordings are mere documents of the performances. However, the film Twilight: Los Angeles (2000) also has artistic value of its own because of the way the medium shifts the artist’s role and focus. For Lee, the art objects are the photographs that result from her actions, while the actions themselves are regarded more as personal ethnographic experience than as performance. I deem the events and the subsequent photographic, filmic, and textual remains to be available for analysis regardless of how the artists might value the art-worthiness of their actions and in spite of the challenges that ephemerality places on that endeavor. In fact, I devote considerable attention to the artists’ writings because their performances of rhetorical personae are an integral part of their overall performances. The rhetorical personae that they perform are different from the fictional personae they assumed during their performances. When writing about her performances, each artist performs versions of herself rather than performing as her assumed persona. In the texts, each presents herself as her artistic ideal. I imagine that when Piper wrote about Mythic Being, she adopted the persona of “Adrian Piper, Conceptual Artist and Philosopher”; when Eleanor Antin wrote about her three-week-long

life performance as Eleanora Antinova, she adopted the persona “Eleanor Antin, Postconceptual Artist and Writer”; when Anna Deavere Smith wrote about her experiences making Twilight, she assumed the persona “Anna Deavere Smith, Actor and Playwright”; and when Nikki S. Lee participated in the making of texts (in the form of interviews, mostly), she performed the persona “Nikki S. Lee, Conceptualist.” That the artists tend to write and talk in the first person about artistic and life matters in relation to their projects leads me to consider the autobiographical components of the texts, rhetorical personae, and performances, especially given that current theories of women’s autobiography, such as those proposed by literary historians Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, treat autobiographical writing as performative.51 Autobiography is a significant site where women assert and give form to their subjectivities, revise concepts of women’s life issues, and make visible formerly invisible topics. Following Smith’s and Watson’s lead, I consider Piper’s, Antin’s, and Smith’s written texts as well as Lee’s spoken texts to be performative so as to analyze how the artists assumed the agency to present themselves, their art, and life actions as they chose. The texts allowed them to project themselves into the various personae that they set up for themselves. For that reason, I understand their writings to be more than inextricably linked to their performances: their texts are performances. These speech-acts enabled the artists to act out and thereby become the personae that they invented for themselves. The rhetorical personae that the artists invented and performed allowed them to represent themselves as whole, united, and unfractured identities separate from the fictional ones they performed in their private and public performances. Perhaps more important to this study, performing rhetorical personae enabled them to assert agency in the construction of their identities in both the public and private spheres. The performances studied here are complicated, so they demand close reads. I stick stubbornly to each object as a sign of respect. I choose the close-read method because its foundations are in formalism: it allows me to analyze the performances and their remains (photographs, video recordings, and written texts) as objects wherein the form and style they take matters. Make no mistake, my analysis of medium and form does not preclude me from interrogating the social and political ramifications of the works. Instead, reading the performances closely has enabled me to approach them with tools gathered from outside my own discipline of art

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history—which includes performance, literary, and ethnic studies—and to understand better the artists’ social, political, and art-history contributions to the effects of the politics of identity on art. As a result, this book thinks of each work not as a case study but as a core sample. I borrow that term from the geologist’s lexicon and understand it to mean a sample of solid material (such as earth, rock, or ice) that is collected in such a way that it contains traces of various strata simultaneously. Considered the “heart” of the material, the core sample is a distillation of the environment from which it was collected, unlike the case study for which information is collected and brought to bear on the object at hand. The core sample, by contrast, is integral to the environment from which it was extracted. Thinking of these artists’ performances as core samples allows me to think of their projects as being embedded within and part of their discrete cultural and discursive milieus. Each of the works presents a complicated intersection of challenging topics and has its own set of logical operations. Each bears traces of the historical, intellectual, cultural, and discursive time in which it was made, while at the same time reflecting popular ideas and academic theories of identity prevalent during its making. In an effort to contribute to the historicization of the politics of identity in art, the focus remains on how the works engage issues of identity. Thinking critically and historically about the politics of identity is a worthwhile endeavor: the art, artists, and politics of that moment have much to teach us about our current moment when the rhetoric of postidentity and colorblindness seeks to erase difference and efface the material consequences of those differences.



1 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women, 1975, one of three black and white photographs, 8 x 10 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin and Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, Los Angeles

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“The Politics of My Position”​ Adrian Piper and Mythic Being

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n a photograph of a city sidewalk, entitled “The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women” (1975) (figure 1), pedestrians walk alongside parked cars, moving toward and away from colonial-style buildings in the distance. In the foreground, a man sits in profile on the top of two brick steps. With his head turned away from the camera and toward an approaching pedestrian, which obscures any distinguishable facial features, we can make out only a man of short stature with curly hair and eyeglasses. Pressing a cigarette between his lips, he sits with arms crossed, resting on knees that are slightly less than shoulder-width apart. A second man sits a few feet down on the same step. He is farther away in distance and should appear smaller due to the perspective of the photograph, but he is visibly larger than the man in the foreground. The man in the foreground has small feet, and there is a light manner in the way his arms lean against each other. His hand rests delicately on his thigh, and his pinky finger seems slightly raised above the others. His back curves gently, tilting his pelvis forward and making his position look cramped and closed. Suddenly, the figure in the foreground doesn’t look quite so male. In fact, the person sitting casually in the foreground of the photograph is not a man at all. He is the Mythic Being,

the fictionalized male persona performed by the African American woman artist Adrian Piper from 1973 through 1975. Piper began work on the Mythic Being project when she was twenty-four, bringing the character to life by dressing in “drag” and wearing an Afro wig, moustache, sunglasses, and “working-class” clothes.1 During the two years in which Piper adopted the male form, the Mythic Being appeared on the street in public environments, roaming around Manhattan and Cambridge, riding the subway, and attending concerts and movies. He cruised white women, as the title of the photograph suggests, and once, he even (fake) “mugged” another man in a park.2 The persona can be seen in a documentary film about the New York art scene, in still photographs that record performances, in hand-worked photographic images of staged tableaux, as well as advertisements in the Village Voice.3 Whether staged in public settings like parks, galleries, and mass-transit vehicles or in the private environment of the artist’s apartment, the Mythic Being performances were largely encountered by nontraditional audiences who did not belong to the art world. Or there was no audience at all. That the audience for Mythic Being was unusual should not be taken as a sign that the artist was not concerned with audience. On the contrary, Piper was deeply concerned with who would witness the performances as well as with how her art would reach audience members. She devoted considerable thought to the subject of how to distribute the persona, ultimately devising a complex mathematical structure, like those she used in her conceptualist artworks from the late 1960s. She would “isolate” and mine 144 passages from her diary, mount the same number of performances, then “publicize” and circulate the same number of twodimensional works through a “widely distributed newspaper.”4 Though Piper did not adhere to the strict numerical component of the project, the method of distributing these manifold and diverse objects remained equal in significance to their production. Together, Piper’s end products, the means for dispersing them, and her efforts to engage an audience tell a complicated story about the artist’s negotiation of identity and exploration of a liminal space where she could be both self and “other,” subject and object, simultaneously. The narrative of the Mythic Being series is necessarily structured by the politics of identity—the discourse and ideology which assert that identity is an appropriate platform from which to forge community, a site around which to rally

political support, a stage from which to act politically, and a matter worthy of artistic exploration and expression. This chapter considers not only how Mythic Being is structured by the politics of identity, but also how the project structures the discourse. Unlike retroactive attempts to interpolate the project as representative of “identity politics art,” it suggests that Mythic Being is perhaps better characterized as participating in making the ideology available for artistic production, as an actor whose effect was considerable, even if unanticipated. The chapter argues that the series—which is poised amid culturally nationalist and biologically determinist theories of identity, artistic practices like conceptualism and minimalism that appear to be identity neutral, and complicated social, political, and historical phenomena—reveals the tensions between individual and communal identifications, individualism and universalism, and the important role audience plays in such mediations. In short, it examines one artist’s inadvertent yet productive engagement with the politics of identity, a discourse whose tectonic plates were, at the time, not yet fused but shifting.

Wedged between Discourses The actions and attitudes portrayed and detailed in “Mythic Being: Cruising White Women” (figure 1), “Mythic Being: I Embody” (plate 1), and “Mythic Being: Getting Back” (figures 2a–e)—all of which correspond to iconographic narratives surrounding black men belonging to the working class—have led critics and scholars to apply to the series the phrase “identity politics art.”5 Coined in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shorthand term was initially applied to artworks that openly addressed social, political, and historical issues relating to an artist’s identification; however, it later came to be aligned with the judgment that such works of art demonstrated poor technical skill, a lack of concern for form, and an indulgence in separatist, self-centered politics. The application of the “identity politics” moniker to Mythic Being signals a retrospective approach that frames the series in relation to Piper’s later work, in which she addresses matters of race, discrimination, and xenophobia directly. It is simultaneously an assertion that Piper’s performances were calculated to elicit negative responses from viewers as well as an interpretation of the project as a critique of the stereotypical manner in which black men are regarded by, and

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represented in, American culture. That such an appellation and series of interpretations could be attached to the project and persona will be taken up subsequently. For now, the dismissive term “identity politics art” is put aside and the discursive and historic roots of the politics of identity will be examined in an effort to conjure up the discursive, sociopolitical, and arthistory landscape which Piper embarked on in Mythic Being. Though it is taken for granted that the politics of identity is a discourse that followed the civil rights movement, it is important to understand how the black freedom struggle of the late 1950s and 1960s related to earlier liberation movements, how it informed the liberation movements that followed directly on its heels, and ultimately how it continues to shape the politics of identity. In truth, many of the principles of the black freedom struggle are common to other freedom movements because of the strategies learned and adapted from anticolonial, independence movements in India and Africa. For instance, suppression was the primary focus against

2a–e Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Getting Back #1, 1975, black and white photographs, 10 x 8 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin and Generali Foundation, Vienna, collection Generali Foundation, Vienna

which people were motivated. Group members and leaders demanded selfdetermination and self-evaluation separate from the oppressive judgments and practices of the dominant culture. On a micro or grassroots level, lay and professional activists engaged in person-to-person interactions, including consciousness-raising meetings and peer-pressure sessions that brought common experiences of injustice to light and encouraged people to act. Similarly, activities such as voter registration drives, literacy programs, and restaurant sit-ins were organized. They promoted change, informed supporters, and contested unfair and unequal treatment. In these ways, people who might have felt isolated by their oppression learned that their experiences were not only personal but common to the larger group as well. On a macro or systemic level, mass demonstrations were launched to protest the complex network of unjust and discriminatory practices and laws that oppressed the larger group. Large-scale events—such as the March on Washington in 1963 that rallied support for labor reform, racial equality, and the passage of civil rights legislation, and the Selma marches in 1965 that protested voting disenfranchisement in Alabama—gathered wide-ranging endorsement because they were attended by demonstrators from across the nation and were documented on national television and in print news. Essentially, they became emblematic of the larger fight for equality and justice. Tactical meetings to plan such large-scale actions also functioned to provide progress updates and foment energy. Likewise, by practicing participatory democracy, individuals were empowered to voice decisions and assume roles of authority from which they had previously been excluded. Information technology and mass media outlets were engaged in sophisticated ways to distribute messages that approved wide-ranging justice and equality in topics that ranged from parity in educational opportunities to equal voting rights to fair representation in government to the rectification of economic disparities. The focus of the black freedom struggle was, of course, equality for African Americans, and political and social action would not have taken place were it not for the collective identification that such tactics created. African Americans were encouraged to look beyond class, color, region, gender, and other differences and to unite around the recognition that disempowerment, disenfranchisement, and economic suppression were experiences shared by the collective and not solely endured by the individual. Membership in the African American collective, often perceived as involuntary and negative because it was determined by the majoritarian and domi-

nant group, was suddenly recoded as positive and wholesome, an appropriate identification around which to lobby for political and social action. In the end, knowledge of, and participation in, these social and political actions gave authority to African Americans, fostering feelings of agency, empowerment, and righteous subjectivity that were based in a positive expression and experience of their collective African American identification. Many individuals who participated in the civil rights movement moved on to other liberation programs, such as black power, women’s rights, and gay rights, which were also based in collective identification. Women drew an analogy between their debased position in relation to men and that of blacks in relation to whites. This occurred at the same time that many people were both energized by positive experience of successful policy changes and motivated by the negative instances of being barred from decisionmaking capacities in the freedom struggle. In response, they launched the second wave feminist or women’s liberation movement. Black power was inaugurated in a similar fashion by African Americans who were dissatisfied with aspects of the freedom struggle, namely, the slow advancement of racial integration and the reliance on nonviolent tactics. These and other movements adapted key strategies—including person-to-person interactions executed in consciousness-raising and peer pressure meetings, grassroots organizing, coordination of sit-ins and marches, and participatory democracy—and used them in the service of their causes. In spite of the differences in their programmatic aims, these movements were linked not just by their adoption and adaptation of similar organizing strategies but also by an identification-based orientation that places identity as the motivating force behind the pursuit of equality, self-determination, and autonomy. Moreover, each reform movement viewed the cultural sphere as a critical site for articulating intentions, staking claims, and building community. Culture was not a superfluous extra but a significant location where identity was constituted, performed, and dispersed. The cultural extension of black power was the black arts movement, and though its beginning coincides with his untimely death, Malcolm X was perhaps first to articulate the relevance of the cultural realm to this iteration of African American empowerment. As Lisa Gail Collins points out, Malcolm X looked toward Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor and their pan-African cultural nationalistic work in relation to Négritude when he argued, “Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.”6 With direct Adrian Piper

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language that echoed the ideas of the social philosopher Alain Locke, Malcolm X espoused the belief that the “great continent” and “proud” people of Africa provided the cultural material with which African Americans could “recapture our heritage and . . . identity” and “liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy.”7 Cultural nationalist organizer Maulana Ron Karenga agreed with Malcolm X’s clarion call, writing, “We stress culture because it gives identity, purpose, and direction. It tells you who you are, what you must do, and how you can do it.”8 If, as Collins suggests, Malcolm X was the patron saint of the black arts movement, the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir played a similar role for the women’s liberation movement. In her book The Second Sex, Beauvoir railed against the suppression of women and the lack of attention paid to their contributions to humanity. She argued that women must contribute “art, literature, [and] philosophy” to humanity because creations in these fields are “unequivocal” evidence that an individual is “a being who has liberty,” a person who is an empowered subject.9 Artist and feminist activist Judy Chicago took a similar tack, advocating that women first focus on their circumstances, then transform those experiences into artistic “subject matter.”10 In essence, she suggested that only by delving deeply into one’s personal circumstances could a woman artist “reveal the whole nature of the human condition.”11 The healing of social and psychic traumas, on individual and communal levels, was key to both reform movements; each viewed the expression of such traumas in cultural products as an important means to fostering reconciliation, building support, and taking action. In an Ebony magazine article in 1969, black arts writer and advocate Larry Neal explained that in order to develop a collective, liberated, and empowered identity, blacks needed to see themselves in “positive terms” and create a “world in terms of [their] own realities.”12 Black arts, he continued, was “concerned with the cultural and spiritual liberation of Black America. It takes upon itself the task of expressing, through various art forms, the Soul of the Black Nation. [It] link[s], in a highly conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of Black people.”13 Performing a role in the women’s art movement similar to Neal’s in black arts, Lucy Lippard claimed that art, like politics, possessed “the power to envision, move, and change.”14 She maintained, “A developed feminist consciousness brings with it an altered concept of reality and morality that is crucial to the art being made and to the lives lived with that art. We take for granted that making art is not

simply ‘expressing oneself’ but is . . . expressing oneself as a member of a larger unity, or comm./unity, so that in speaking for oneself one is also speaking for those who cannot speak.”15 Contrary to the idea of the artist as an isolated genius, black arts and women’s art movement activists stressed the need for artists to occupy politically and socially engaged positions within their communities. Both camps decried the concept of “art for art’s sake,” deeming it elitist and anticommunity. Jeff Donaldson, artist and founder of Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), articulated the sentiment succinctly: “Black image makers are creating forms that define, glorify, and direct black people—an art for the people’s sake. . . . We can no longer afford the luxury of ‘art for art’s sake’.”16 Neal also voiced the opinion that artists should service their communities. The goal of the black aesthetic, he asserted, was “communication and liberation,” and it could be reached through “an art that addresses itself directly to Black people; an art that speaks to us in terms of our feelings and ideas about the world; an art that validates the positive aspects of our life style. Dig: An art that opens us up to the beauty and ugliness within us; that makes us understand our condition and each other in a more profound manner; that unites us, exposing us to our painful weaknesses and strengths.”17 By contrast, Lippard was careful to empower both the individual and her community, arguing that successful art would attend to the needs of the individual artist as well as those of the larger group: “I do not think it is possible to make important or even communicable art without some strong sense of source and self on one hand and some strong sense of audience and communication on the other.”18 Still it is clear that art workers in both movements prioritized art’s ability to communicate to target audiences of group insiders as equivalent both to the content and subject matter it explored and to the artist’s aesthetic abilities. In addition to forming collectives, founding exhibition spaces, and creating collaborative artworks that countered the exclusion that characterized the mainstream art world, women’s art and black arts movement activists advocated a collective aesthetic program that would foster the groups’ aims and signal their separation from the mainstream. Lippard explained that she was “all in favor of a separatist art world for the time being,” until women artists could “express themselves freely,” make art that was not dominated by male-centric ideas, and feel “as at home in the world as men are.”19 Feminist artist Faith Wilding explained that she and Adrian Piper

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other colleagues sought a female art that “deals with the experience, sensations, and emotions of women” with “images and forms [that are] honest, direct, exposed, tender, and emotionally evocative.”20 Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, then codirectors of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), identified “central core imagery” that visually echoes the vagina as a recurring motif in women’s art. They espoused its use by contemporary practitioners as a way for a woman artist to “explore her own identity [and] to assert her sense of her own sexuality.”21 The visual program put forth by black arts activists was different from that proffered by women’s art advocates, but it was articulated in equally direct, if not dogmatic, terms. Donaldson, upon the disbanding of OBAC and the formation of AFRI-COBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), elucidated the group’s purpose—to create works “inspired by African people/experience and images which African people can relate to directly without formal art training”—as well as its visual agenda—to make objects that “deal with the past . . . relate to the present . . . look to the future” and “appeal to the senses, not the intellect.”22 In a catalogue of the group’s exhibition at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery, AFRICOBRA founding member Barbara Jones Hogu outlined the five tenets that composed the group’s aesthetic program: “free symmetry,” which included the “rhythmic repetition . . . of color, texture, shapes, form, pattern, movements, feature”; “mimesis at mid-point” or “design which marks . . . where the real and the unreal, the objective and the non-objective meet”; “visibility,” which was understood as “clarity of form and line”; “luminosity or shine” in its “literal and figurative” connotations; and “bright colors [associated] with sensibility and harmony.”23 It is clear that participants and activists in the women’s art and black arts movements saw art as integral to the creation of a collective identification, fundamental to the building of community, central to the assumption of an empowered authority, and vital to countering oppression. Ultimately, the rhetoric that supported the goals of ending suppression, fostering self-empowerment, and promoting communal identification, on which the black power and women’s liberation movements were focused, were judged to be particularist, self-interested, and separatist. Likewise, their cultural corollaries, the black arts and women’s art movements espoused ideologies that came under attack for being exclusionary and essentialist. Nevertheless, a number of landmark artworks that, like Piper’s

Mythic Being, take their makers’ identifications as springboards to engage with society, politics, and history were created during this period. These were watershed years when many women artists, Piper among them, explored gender identity through what Moira Roth has termed “persona-play” performances.24 Incorporating equal parts autobiography and mythology, feminist persona-play artists dressed as and acted out characters that were thought to represent or embody gender types.25 In 1972, Linda Montano began dressing up as the mythic persona Chicken Woman and launching performances in the streets of San Francisco.26 That same year, Eleanor Antin created and performed as the male persona The King of Solano Beach in San Diego. By assuming the facial hair, clothing, and behaviors of a seventeenth-century nobleman and acting as though Solano Beach was his kingdom, Antin enacted the sense of privilege, entitlement, and humor that she imagined the new gender and class afforded her. A few years later, Lynn Hershman created Roberta Breitmore (1975–78) and, as that character, led a quotidian existence that included opening bank accounts, attending Weight Watchers meetings, and dating men in various parts of the country.27 In Los Angeles, Suzanne Lacy explored age, gender, and class dynamics by performing the characters Bag Lady (1977), Old Lady (1977), and Donaldina Cameron, the colonial missionary (1977).28 A couple of years later, Howardena Pindell created the video Free, White, and 21 (1980), which stages a confrontational and troubling conversation between the artist and the character White Woman in which Pindell plays both roles, and Lorraine O’Grady erected Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire (1980), who famously protested the New Museum’s Persona exhibition because of its exclusion of African American artists.29 These persona performances allowed women artists to examine and critique the alienating effects of gender and class conventions—and, some might argue, racial and ethnic identity—while temporarily trespassing their boundaries. Piper’s Mythic Being performances participate in that history. Male artists too were influenced by radical theories of gender identity. Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) and Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) are perhaps most representative of how male artists explored gender through performance. In Seedbed, Acconci lay underneath a ramp he built in the Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated while gallery visitors walked through the space. At the same time, he spoke into a microphone that amplified his words, sounds, and fantasies into the gallery for visitors to hear. For Shoot, Burden arranged to have a gun fired at him. He stood at one end of F Space Adrian Piper

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gallery while a male colleague stood at the other with a gun. The shooter took aim and fired a bullet. Burden was shot in the arm in a room filled with spectators. Seedbed and Shoot are very different works, but they have two important topics in common. First, each performance concerns itself with audience, especially by implicating viewers in the work, and second, each tests the limits of the male body and the conventions that govern its behavior as well as the myth of artistic genius associated with it. In Seedbed, Acconci confronted visitors not just with the physical objects and material substances that mark his body as male but also with the phallus, the ideological apparatus that endows male artists with the power to create.30 Shoot is equally insistent on the masculinity of its maker; it emphasizes Burden’s control of the visitors, the shooter, and the work, the militarism of gunfire, and the mortality of a young male body that, under other conditions, might have been deemed immortal. Piper is endowed with a certain ideological and aesthetic cosmopolitanism that could perhaps only be fostered in a young, gifted, and precocious Manhattanite such as herself. Consider key coordinates of her background: she was raised middle class in Harlem by educated parents who were politically aware, participating in the March on Washington in 1963 with their then-teenage daughter. She attended schools populated by upper middleclass white children who lived in Manhattan’s Upper East and West sides, participated in liberal-oriented camps and other afterschool programs, took advantage of high and low cultural events the city offered, and spent her leisure time with bohemian types from downtown. It is not surprising, then, that she wedged herself between prevailing discourses, just as she positioned her artistic practice productively between several stylistic traditions. In the late 1960s, she was a practicing conceptualist whose work was being shown at the Dwan Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, two of the leading exhibition spaces for conceptual art in New York. She had been included in some major group exhibitions of conceptual art, such as 557, 087 at the Seattle Art Museum (1969), Plans and Projects as Art at the Kunsthalle Bern (1969), and Information at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1970). Piper produced straightforward conceptualist works that hint, only in the most oblique ways, at issues of identity and politics. In 1970, all that changed. Piper’s social consciousness was raised when “the outside world” of violence and discrimination invaded her “aesthetic isolation.”31 She was deeply influenced by the expansion of the war in

Southeast Asia, the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, and the antiwar efforts on her own campus, City College of New York, which resulted in a campuswide shut-down (30).32 The protests at Kent State University and Jackson State College, which ended in death after National Guardsmen opened fire on protestors, made a particularly strong impact on her (30). Ideologies of self-improvement and empowerment, espoused in the rhetoric of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and black power movements also affected Piper, although she was not an active participant in public demonstrations (31).33 She became an avid newspaper reader and radio listener (31). She was no doubt aware of the demonstration in August 1970 when fifty thousand women, led by Betty Friedan and Eleanor Holmes Norton, marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage; informed of the Senate hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment and the numerous sexual discrimination cases being filed against universities; and conscious that certain legal binds on women’s bodies, reproduction, and sex had been overturned in 1970, when abortion was legalized in New York State (and across the nation in 1973) (89). Moreover, she was friendly with members of the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, the Art Workers Coalition, and Women Artists for Revolution (WAR)—organizations that mobilized protests against museums, galleries, and the mainstream art establishment for their collusion with the capitalist economy and for the lack of representation of women artists and artists of color.34 Piper reported that her professional, political, and aesthetic landscape was transformed because by the early 1970s she was “dropped by the art world.”35 It seems that certain of its representatives learned some of the particulars of her identity, namely, that she is a woman and is black. She grew “dissatisfied” with “the entire art context” and “the medium of conceptual documentation”—concluding that neither was an appropriate space to explore and “express [her] aesthetic concerns.”36 The social, political, and military upheavals in the world “managed to infiltrate my awareness and thereby determine me and my work in ways that confront me with the politics of my position whether I want to know them or not; I have become self-conscious” (32). As a result, the artist “did a lot of thinking about [her] position as an artist, a woman, and a black; and about the natural disadvantages of those attributes” (31, italics mine). Piper’s use of the word “natural” in relation to her racial and gender identifications reflects the degree to which she was steeped in this discurAdrian Piper

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sive moment when identities were understood to be natural, authentic, and stable categories in which individuals found community and political motivation and to which they automatically belonged. On the one hand, the phrase expresses some measure of biological or phenotypical “truth”— she identifies as a woman and African American, and such a combined or intersectional identity can result in one being “disadvantaged.” On the other hand, her use of the term displays a lack of awareness of the current understanding that all identifications are socially constructed and politically determined, as are the privileges and disadvantages that attend them. Piper’s writing about her perception of identification and identity reveals her embeddedness in her historic and intellectual moment, making clear that the notions of “race,” “gender,” and the framework behind identity had not yet come into question for her. The artist dramatically reconceptualized her practice as a result of contemplating the “nature” of her “position as an artist, a woman, and a black.” If aspects of her visual appearance, physical embodiment, and lived experience as an artist, woman, and black determined how she was treated, then she would make those identifications and the viewer’s perception of them her aesthetic and political focus. The body—that is, her body—would figure prominently in her work over the next five years. She would employ it as medium and material to explore the politics of individual and collective identity, examine theories of perception, and survey subject/object relations. In addition to being influenced by her study of yoga and philosophy, Piper’s body-oriented practice was nourished by the modern choreography and street performance traditions popular in New York at the time. As early as 1966, Piper attended happenings and performances by Robert Rauschenberg, Simone Forti, and Marcel Duchamp at the School for Visual Art, and Yvonne Rainer at the Judson Church; their forms ranged from non-narrative dance to bodies extended through prosthetics and from time-based events to temporary transformations into different personae.37 Through those events and others, the artist came to understand the roles that chance and improvisation play in performance, be aware of how performance could examine time by pushing the limits of viewers’ attention, and see different ways of engaging an audience. In this way, she designed a set of parameters for her performances: to preserve the impact and uncategorized nature of the confrontation, she did not perform

any unusual or theatrical actions of any kind and eschewed the audienceversus-performer separation that attends certain performance genres.38 Piper’s essay “Art as Catalysis” from 1970 serves as a mission statement for the performance projects she would launch in the following years, and it makes plain that the artist’s body—her body in particular—was the only medium through which impact could be made: “The strongest impact that can be received by a person in the passive capacity of viewer is the impact of human confrontation (within oneself or between people). It is the most aggressive and the most threatening, possibly because the least predictable and the least controllable in its consequences” (34). “One reason for making and exhibiting a work,” she continued, “is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer. . . . The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself” (32). She determined that the power of the artist lay in her ability to perform: “The artist [herself] becomes the catalytic agent inducing change in the viewer; the viewer responds to the catalytic presence of the artist as artwork” (34). This new performative mode, Piper explained, was particularly useful because, with her own body as the object, she felt an immediate and direct link to the art-making process, the end product was just “one step away from the original idea” (36). Equally significant was her determination that her performance works be inserted into situations that were not necessarily considered art. Some aspects of Piper’s “Art as Catalysis” read as a manifesto for the politics of identity as they were set out by women’s art and black arts movement advocates. She established that her body—the locus of her identifications and experiences, the object of others’ perceptions of her, and the subject of “disadvantages”—was a medium of change. She resolved to use her body and identifications as agents of confrontation, to force change in viewers. She made up her mind to launch her works outside the context of the art world, in arenas where her art would ostensibly encounter a lay audience. Yet, her work shows some significant departures from the aesthetic and political programs that the black arts and women’s arts movements conceptualized. For instance, even in an era when the phrase “the personal is political” held sway, Piper’s emphatic reliance on her own body is remarkably self-referential.39 Likewise, while she mentions viewers and how her art should affect them, she does not speak of community building, communal cooperation, or collective identity, nor does she frame her

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idea to place her work outside of the art world in communitarian terms. Clearly, Mythic Being and the projects immediately preceding it traverse a line of engagement and disengagement with the discourse. The Catalysis series (1970–71) set the stage for the Mythic Being performances by allowing Piper to “catalyze” or affect audiences. It also allowed her to seek insight into herself as the object that people saw, even if the performances did not openly address the artist who was occupying a specific raced and gendered position in the world. For Catalysis I, Piper wore rancid, smelly clothes on the subway during rush hour and while browsing through a popular bookstore on a busy evening. A photograph of Catalysis III (see figure 3) shows pedestrians giving the artist wide berth upon noticing that her shirt is soaked with the wet paint that the placard she wears announces. Similarly, in Catalysis IV (see figure 4), Piper stuffed a towel in her mouth and, with distended cheeks and the towel hanging down to her chest, rode the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator.40 In addition to prefiguring the temporary alterations of her appearance that Piper would make for the Mythic Being, Catalysis explores the relationship between art and audience and examines alternate methods of distributing artworks and reaching audiences. The photographs of the Catalysis performances that survive show that Piper was no passive object being acted upon in the world. They illustrate the ways in which the artist externalized or broadcast difference as a method of provocation and confrontation and suggest that the actions were designed to stimulate reactions from non-art-world audiences. The Catalysis works are also an exploration of power relations and autonomy that will be manifested in the Mythic Being performances, as Piper explained to Lucy Lippard in an interview in 1972, The scary thing about it for me is that there is something about doing this [performance art] that involves you in a kind of universal solipsism. When you start realizing that you can do things like that, that you are capable of incorporating all those different things into your realm of experience, there comes a point where you can’t be sure whether what you are seeing is of your own making, or whether it is objectively true.41 The artist’s use of the phrase “universal solipsism” demonstrates that her performance work was self-involved and self-referential. Indeed, that she intended to affect herself and expand her own consciousness seems to have been her first priority. Her statement also suggests that she felt



3 Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970, one of two black and white photographs mounted on page with text, 5 x 5 in. each, © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin and collection Thomas Erben, New York



4 Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970–71, one of two black and white photographs mounted on page with text, 5 x 5 in. each, © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin and collection Thomas Erben, New York

powerful in “incorporating . . . different things into [her] realm of experience” and in making a reality for herself. Seeking more explanation from Piper, Lippard asks, “Because you begin to have almost too much power over the situation?” To which Piper responded: Yes. You know you are in control, that you are a force acting on things, and it distorts your perception. The question is whether there is anything left to external devices or chance. How are people when you’re not there? It gets into a whole philosophical question. I found that at times it’s exhilarating, too. It is a heady thing, which has to do with power, obviously.42 The artist admitted that the feelings of agency she derived from the actions were “exhilarating” and “heady.”43 Clearly, the power to act out on an audience, to be “a force acting on things,” was a motivating factor in the earlier Catalysis performances, as was the authority to shape her own identity. During the summer of 1971, Piper embarked on Food for the Spirit, a series of performances that further mark her uneasy engagement with the aesthetic ideologies proffered at the time. The objective of the actions was “to anchor [her]self in the physical world.”44 As a result of spending the summer “doing nothing else but studying and writing a paper on [Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason], doing yoga, and fasting,” Piper recalls feeling as though she was “on the verge of abdicating [her] individual self” and of “losing [her] sense of self completely” (55). The performance consisted of the artist photographing herself in a mirror every time the fear of losing herself overtook her and made her do a “reality check” (55). Her purpose was “to record [her] physical appearance objectively” (55). The remaining, grainy self-portraits (see plate 2) picture the artist’s mostly nude body; they are her “ritualized [and] frequent contacts with the physical appearance of [her]self,” the indices of a process that tethered her to the physical realm (55). If Food for the Spirit documents Piper’s first experience with becoming “other” to herself, it also testifies to her body, her subjectivity, and her self and makes claims for her individual and not collective agency. These are the ideas that would structure Mythic Being. Piper began work on the project in 1973, and in August of that year she decided to dress in “drag, as a boy,” venture into the world disguised as the Mythic Being, and to disperse his persona and his thoughts (101 and 104).45 Just a month later, the first of the Mythic Being advertisementworks (figure 5) was published in the 27 September issue of the Village Voice.



5 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 9/21/61, 1973, Village Voice newspaper ad of 27 Sept. 1973, #1 of seventeen, 147/8 x 111/2 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin

Scanning page fifty-six, one can see that John Fitzsimmons of the Open Eye group offers acting lessons for beginners, the Jean Cocteau Theater is playing Medea, Waiting for Godeau, and The Lesson, and Steven Baker presents his All Male Revue. Piper’s advertisement, with its photograph of a figure with a big Afro, mustache, and dark sunglasses, might be overlooked were it not for the bulbous-eyed, Mr. Heat Miser–looking mask of the neighboring ad, which draws attention to that portion of the page. The head and shoulders of the figure appear in the lower left quadrant of the frame. Standing in front of a plain, light-colored backdrop, he wears sunglasses and a black turtleneck and holds a cigar to his mouth. To the right of the figure are bubbles that increase in size as they lead toward a thought balloon. Rather than announcing auditions, lessons, or an upcoming play in the demanding, impersonal tone of ad-language, the handwritten text that reads, “TODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. THE ONLY DECENT BOYS IN MY CLASS ARE ROBBIE AND CLYDE. I THINK I LIKE CLYDE. 9/21/61” is oddly personal and anachronistic. The ad-work reflects many of Piper’s concerns for the series, and it points to her limited engagement with the dominant identity and aesthetic discourses of the period. For instance, that the series was initially Adrian Piper

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entitled “Vestiges of History” is evident in the artist’s use of a passage from her personal diary as the text she used to accompany the photograph of the persona. Indeed, although she articulated a desire to “become someone else, someone without a personal history,” she based the character’s actions and history on experiences she had recorded in her own journal.46 The personal passages functioned as “mantras” that Piper would recite over and over before and during the mounting of public and private performances in order to transform herself into and remain in character (103). Employing excerpts from her journal would certainly be acceptable according to women’s art and black arts movement ideologies because they supported the synecdochic use of autobiography and personal history in art making. At the same time, it emphasizes Piper’s individual artistic authority because she grounds her art in her own history and identifications. The Mythic Being texts, including the first one which mentioned Robbie and Clyde on the first day of school, are peculiarly private, as they are personal thoughts that “deal with important events” in Piper’s life (103). Yet, they also reflect the artist’s goal to interact with audiences. For example, because they contain floating signifiers that render open and inhabitable the positions of “I” and “my,” the passages encourage readers or viewers to put themselves in the persona’s position and interpret the text from an individual point of view. Piper’s use of such words was purposeful: she imagined that the sentiments expressed in the passages—in this case, the evidence of a budding sexuality—and contained in the ads were “common” to all people and that Voice viewers or readers would empathize with them (112). In addition to signaling Piper’s desire to interact with viewers and readers, this and other ad-works underscore her desire to act on the audience. Stripping power away from the personally significant memories required that they be scattered among an audience. Piper’s goal to “disperse” the mythic character and the sentiments she assigned to him functioned multiply, first as an aesthetic exercise to distribute her artworks through untraditional channels but also to rid herself of troublesome experiences by releasing them onto viewers or readers and into the world (109). The artist intended to “transcend . . . the personal” by publicizing the mantras and reproducing “the identity in a widely distributed newspaper” (106). Her distribution of personal experiences was not community engagement in the senses suggested by black arts and women’s art movement advocates. Rather, they are instances of Piper confronting or acting on viewers

and readers. Above all, it is a declaration of her autonomy in making her own identity, a political assertion of artistic agency, and a pronouncement of the right to use aspects of her identifications in her artistic practice.

Race-ing Masculinity, or, The Mythic Being as Black Man? “Mythic Being: I Embody” (1975) (plate 1) is probably the best-known image of Piper’s Mythic Being project and the fulcrum on which the evaluation of the series as representative of “identity politics art” rests. The black and white photograph with oil crayon drawing features a close-up of Piper wearing the Mythic Being costume. It is generally interpreted as evidence that the artist enacted an exaggerated masculinity associated with black males in an attempt to draw attention to the ways in which the subjectivities of black men, and by extension all black people, are limited by stereotypical narratives. “Mythic Being: I Embody” provides a useful jumping-off point to not only contemplate that assessment but also consider how the artist continued to cultivate and refine her understanding, use, and shaping of the discourse of the politics of identity. Let us begin by examining what is taken to be the most obvious fact of the work: that “I Embody” features Piper dressed as a black man. The visual facts: the artist wears an Afro wig and sunglasses; and she is dressed in a dark-colored shirt. A cigar rests between her index and middle fingers, and she holds it to her mouth. Positioned in the left of the frame, Piperas-Mythic Being turns to her right slightly in order to meet the viewer’s eyes. Using an oil crayon, Piper shadowed the Mythic Being’s face, drew reflections into his sunglasses, and built up the dark curls around his face. A thought balloon that hangs over the persona’s right shoulder contains Piper’s handwritten words, “I EMBODY EVERYTHING YOU MOST HATE AND FEAR.” The signs Piper manipulates in “I Embody” have significant power in referencing the racially and class-specific masculinity often assigned to a segment of the population of African American men. After all, the Afro came to signal African Americans, clothing refers to class background, and behavior is taken as an indicator of educational and cultural background. Yet, in spite of Piper’s increasing interest in the politics of identity and difference, she did not address the racial specifics of the persona in her writing from the time. In 1980, a full five years after she finished that perAdrian Piper

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sona as performance, Piper described the character as her “seeming opposite: a third world, working-class, overtly hostile male,” and eventually, as her critical engagement with racism and xenophobia developed, she referred to the character as a “young black male.”47 But, when she was working on the Mythic Being in the early to mid-1970s, she called the character “third world” (147). The term “third world” references people who come from the “third” or “developing” world. The “third world” generally refers to the underdeveloped areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where people with darker complexions live, thus the phrase “third world” was, and, for the most part, continues to be, synonymous with “raced” (whether red, black, brown, or yellow) people. Piper’s word choice does double duty: it suggests a political affiliation that was popular among leftist people of color at the time, and it allows circumvention of the specifics of the persona’s racial or ethnic designation. Instead, Piper employed anthropological-sounding language to define the character. According to the artist, “A mythic being [is] a fictitious or abstract personality that is generally part of a story or folktale used to explain or sanctify social or legal institutions or natural phenomena” (147). The “mythic” persona would function for her as “an immaterial art entity,” “a personality who is at the same time not an individual” with a personal history and experiences (108–9). Piper’s journal passages suggest that she intended for the character to stay in the mythic realm, rather than being tied to a specific place, history, or context. Piper had adopted the anthropologist’s language and demeanor previously when describing social outsiders who made a profound impression on her and her conceptualization of the Mythic Being project. She recalled taking “careful note” of “alcoholics, panhandlers, freaks, crazies, fake blind beggars, street performers, fighting couples, copulating dogs, overdressed prostitutes, and protest marchers” in an effort “to concretize further [her] spectator’s vision of [her]self as an art object” (94). She romanticized and primitivized social outcasts at the same time that she identified with them. Moreover, her use of social outcasts as fodder for her art suggests that her class and educational background provided some measure of distance from them. One encounter was particularly significant to Piper’s creation of the character and series. The artist recalled that she and two friends were sitting on a park bench when a “very seedy”-looking “tall black man” walked past them (91). Piper took meticulous note of his dress, physical appear-

ance, and composure: “He wore a grimy blue pea coat, black knickers, and knee-length leather boots. His hair was twisted into a thousand little 2″-long braids, which stuck straight out all over his head, giving a pincushion effect. He had an untrimmed beard, his eyes were bloodshot. He walked w/ a swagger & smiled broadly” (91–92).48 Then, a second, “seedier looking man” walked up to the first and asked “if he could spare a few cents” (92). According to the artist, the first responded with, “how can you take some cents from a man who got no sense? Huh? You know what I mean? Right? You can’ take nothin’ from a crazy man, you know? Cause no cents is nonsense, so it’s all the same to me, you dig?” (92). He continued in this way while walking through the park. Affecting the objective distance that is supposed to characterize anthropological practice, Piper captured the man’s speech pattern in idiomatic Eng­lish: “No cents is nonsense, right brother? Amean lahk you can’ take nothin froma crazy man, you dig? If he’s crazy, don’ matter what you do. You CAN’ take nothin from ME man, you know whata mean?” (92). Piper’s own “dry, over-intellectualized” and grammatically correct language stands in stark contrast to the idiomatic language she used to record his speech (92). The anthropologist James Clifford, whose work on the sharing of ethnographic and anthropological authority will be discussed in chapter 3, would argue that the different manners in which Piper expressed the black man’s speech and her own language communicate an expanse between herself and her subject. The distance between the artist’s portrayal of the two different phrasings functions to suggest a subject that is inferior, exotic, primitive, or quaint, which, Clifford would likely assert, threatens to reinscribe Eurocentric ideas of racial difference, fixity, and superiority.49 At the very least, Piper’s characterizations of their dissimilar expressions emphasized the different class, education, gender, and positions in the social hierarchy that she and her subject occupy. The same can be said of her depiction of her fictional male persona. Despite her theorization of a mythic and ahistorical background for him, his experiences were culled from Piper’s own, the signs she used to compose him were, and continue to be, situated in a historically and politically particular moment. In the mid-1970s when Piper produced “I Embody,” the icons she used defined the popularly understood characteristics of a young black male, a figure on whom a collage of radical-chic rage, violence, and glamour was pinned. The hope and optimism of the mid- to late 1960s gave way in the early 1970s to considerable frustration with high unemployment, poverty, Adrian Piper

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and urban blight. Similarly, the ideologies of black separatism and empowerment that were suggested by advocates of black nationalism and black power resulted in representations of angry, militant blacks, men especially, who were willing to risk their lives for their beliefs. The images of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which portrayed African Americans as righteous and nonviolent victims of racist authorities and tactics, were replaced with images of aggressive young blacks participating in riots and urban destruction. Young black men were depicted as angry, anarchic criminals on television and in newspapers, and, as Kobena Mercer notes in “Engendered Species,” they became symbols of desolation: While the private lives of black men in the public eye . . . have been exposed to glaring media visibility, it is the “invisible men” of the latecapitalist underclass who have become the bearers—the signifiers—of the hopelessness and despair of our so-called post-Modern condition. Overrepresented in statistics on homicide and suicide, misrepresented in the media as the personification of drugs, disease and crime, such invisible men, like their all-too-visible counterparts, suggest that black masculinity is not merely a social identity in crisis. It is also a key site of ideological representation, a site upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with. At the same time, the movies Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972) and other so-called “blaxploitation films” portrayed black males as “pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males” and glorified them as “cool-as-a-cucumber black studs.”50 Those characters, film scholar Donald Bogle has suggested, are based in the archetypal figure of the black buck: “always [a] big, baadddd nigger, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied” who cannot contain his “lust for white flesh.”51 During this period, Bogle noted, “authentic” blackness came to be associated “with the trappings of the ghetto: the tenements as well as the talk, the mannerisms, and the sophistication of the streets.”52 According to film historian Richard Dyer, stereotypes like those peddled in “blaxploitation films” of the 1970s serve both as an ordering process and a shortcut that “refer to the ‘the world’” and “express ‘our’ values and beliefs.”53 In contrast to social types, which Orrin E. Klapp defined as the kind of person one can expect to find in one’s society, stereotypes represent people who do not belong.54 Dyer noted that, while both social types and stereotypes are “constructed” by iconographic “verbal and visual traits

[that] signal the character,” the stereotype functions to “maintain sharp boundary definitions” between class, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual groups.55 The degree of rigidity and the shrillness of a stereotype, Dyer explained, points to how threatened the majority group feels by the stereotyped group.56 In short, stereotypes are designed to fix existing hierarchies and pecking orders. Piper’s frequent use of the words “sign” and “iconography” in her writings from the time indicates that she understood her own use of stereotypical “markers, signs, and symbols” (cigar, dark sunglasses, and Afro) and their attendant preestablished narratives in “I Embody” and other Mythic Being works.57 Yet, there is also evidence of a profound misrecognition that the iconographic fictions of race, gender, and class that are accessed in the Mythic Being works refer back to black men and the actual historical, social, economic, and political circumstances of their lives. When performing Mythic Being, Piper seemed to work under the assumption that black masculinity was merely a set of signs she could mobilize on the surface of her body. The misrecognition or misunderstanding of the terms in that equation suggests an exceptionalism on the artist’s part that is born out in the assuredness of her drawing. For example, while she keeps the overall composition of the photograph, she changes its tones from a series of grays, visible on the right and left sides of the frame, to stark blacks and whites. Her black background functions to darken and unify the image. The white crayon, by contrast, emphasizes particular areas, such as the speech balloon, the hand and cheek of the figure, and the reflection in the left lens of the glass. Notice the smudged white, which, when muddied by the black crayon, lends a sense of density and volume to the figure’s hand, face, and speech balloon. Piper amplifies the black/white contrast to suggest conflict, a struggle over how to define and constitute the figure. She seems to resolve that conflict by structuring the image of the Mythic Being as equivalent to his words: he is “everything you most hate and fear.” Piper’s hand is assertive. She exceeds the frame of the photograph precisely to show her drawing, to make manifest her artist-ness. Her marks are confident and controlled because, just as the “A” that appears in the left lens of the figure’s eye glasses testifies, Adrian Piper is the artist and she is authorized to make art and identities. However, despite the artist’s silence regarding the race of the Mythic Being and her apparent misunderstanding of the connection between signs Adrian Piper

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and their attendant stereotypical narratives, I Embody resonates with iconographies surrounding black masculinity. When Piper wore an Afro, facial hair, and sunglasses in the Mythic Being performances, she referenced the negative image of black masculinity prevalent at that time; she brought to bear on the figure iconographic and stereotypical narratives. It follows, then, that signs that may have once been mere visual facts become meaningful and are able to communicate problematic iconographic narratives. Piper’s crayon drawings that build up layers of dark curls, reflect light off the figure’s glasses, and shadow the Mythic Being’s face work together to portray Mythic Being as mysterious and cagey: he is someone with something to hide. Viewers read such mark-making in a particular socio-historico-political framework, so when Piper-as-Mythic Being turns to meet the viewers’ gaze, there is a confrontation intuited. The sense of confrontation is only heightened by the text that accompanies his visage. The statement “I EMBODY EVERYTHING YOU MOST HATE AND FEAR” addresses viewers and their feelings directly and personally. “I EMBODY” seems to contain a hidden phrase: “As a black man, I embody everything you most hate and fear,” and the Mythic Being becomes an avatar of stereotypical representations of black men. That black men are seen to be menacing to the white majority plays out in the two competing iconographic narratives that have been put in place precisely to keep them in check. The hypermasculine trope, film scholar Herman Gray explained, attempts to define black men as “incompetent, irresponsible, oversexed, and a threat to white notions of womanhood, family, and nation.”58 The hypermasculine version of the stereotype is most obvious in the Mythic Being performances because the artist described or staged hostile actions in which the character “cruised” women on the street, (fake) mugged people, and sat with legs spread “to accommodate protruding genitalia.”59 Likewise, in “I Embody,” a confrontational and aggressive variety of masculinity is performed through the character’s direct gaze and language as well as through the pronounced draftsmanship of Piper’s drawing. Notwithstanding the photo-works from the project—such as “Mythic Being: I Embody,” “Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter,” and the “Mythic Being: Getting Back,” in which the character indulges in aggressive behaviors—other works in the series activate the trope of the black male emasculated.60 In her essay “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” the cultural critic bell hooks claimed that the fetishization and eroticization of



6 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 12/12/64, 1974, Village Voice newspaper ad of 3 Jan. 1974, #4 of seventeen, 147/8 in. x 111/2 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin

the black man’s body “feminizes,” weakens, and subordinates it.61 Similarly, the power of black males is “diffused” by their lack of authority and agency relative to white males.62 Some of the advertisements that Piper placed in the Village Voice contribute to the narrative trend to portray black men as emasculated. The ad-work in the 3 January 1974 issue (figure 6), for instance, depicts the Mythic Being as an androgynous, liminal, or third sex being. The figure looks like a man but has thoughts that stereotypically seem to be those of a girl or woman. As in the other Mythic Being advertisements, this one features the same photograph of Piper wearing the Mythic Being uniform, but in this case, the text reads, “NO MATTER HOW MUCH I ASK MY MOTHER TO STOP BUYING CRACKERS, COOKIES AND THINGS, SHE DOES ANYWAY, AND SAYS IT’S FOR HER EVEN IF I ALWAYS EAT IT. SO I’VE DECIDED TO FAST. 12-12-64.” If her first Village Voice ad-work—with its text suggestive of adolescent crushes—made assessing the Mythic Being’s gender difficult, then this example, which seems to wrestle with the issue of regulating body image through dieting—a topic typically relegated to females—only furthers the confusion by playing with gender and racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper

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That Piper employs the figure of the Mythic Being to bear the burden of the hypermasculine and emasculated stereotypes and to represent an androgynous alternative suggests, on the part of the artist, a discursive ambivalence surrounding difference, discrimination, and the politics of identity. On the one hand, Piper placed the fictional character in the position of being regarded by viewers as a threatening and “alien” presence.63 He is forced to serve as “a static emblem of confrontation” and an “abstract, generalized, faintly unholy embodiment of expressed hostility, fear, anxiety, estrangement” (138). The persona, she wrote, is “a catalyst for the violence of our world” and “the personification of our subliminal hatreds and dissatisfactions” (138, italics mine). Piper’s linking of the fictional persona with iconographies of black masculinity rendered him the disempowered object of social punishment and control, which only reinforced the debased position of African American men in American society. Yet there is more to Piper’s fictional persona than merely portraying and confronting a stereotype. Because she seemed to understand that stereotypes hinder and limit the subjectivity of the stereotyped individual, Piper afforded the Mythic Being a measure of agency and autonomy by allowing him to act on the audience. For instance, when the persona addresses viewers with the first and second person pronouns “I” and “you” in “I Embody,” he takes them to task for their imaginings and traps them in their fantasies of “hate and fear.” He owns the fact that viewers assume him to be the embodiment of everything they “most hate and fear.” Nor does Piper force the character to take it lying down; instead she turned the tables. The Mythic Being takes “you, the audience, as an object” (138). In that way, “I Embody” and other works from the series are in keeping with Piper’s increased sensitivity to the politics of identity in that she granted the figure the power to challenge the audience’s assumptions. Perhaps more significantly, the artist’s unwillingness to provide the specifics of the Mythic Being’s multiple identifications and utilization of stereotypical signs indicates the importance she gives the audience in the construction, maintenance, and evaluation of identity. Piper’s use of the possessive pronoun “our” in her claim that the Mythic Being is “the personification of our subliminal hatreds and dissatisfactions” points to the disintegrated and disjointed state of the audience, even as it begs the question of who composes the audience (138). Her statement has a different meaning if the audience is assumed to be black men who probably do not consider themselves to be the embodiment of negative attributes than it

does if viewers are imagined to be individuals other than black men. One constituency might understand the statement as an objective fact, while another might regard it as a piece of hyperbolic irony. The imprecision with which Piper manipulated iconographic signs of black masculinity reveals her ambivalent relationship to the politics of identity and exposes the degree to which the discourse had not been fully codified. The Mythic Being project draws from multiple histories, discourses, and performative phenomena at the same time that it separates itself from those traditions. Separateness is, in fact, structural to the series. “The Mythic Being: Getting Back” (1975) provides a position from which to examine some of Piper’s goals for this series: to explore the relationship between internal and external perception; to facilitate Piper’s experience of the audience as an outside object; and to allow her to become a simultaneous subject and object to herself. The five images that compose “Mythic Being: Getting Back” (figures 2a–e) record a series of actions that Piper mounted in and around Cambridge Common and underscore the evaluation that visual and perceptual differentiation, and not seamless sameness, is integral to Mythic Being. She appears as the Mythic Being in all of the photographs, and David Auerbach, Piper’s friend and fellow graduate student, is also present. The first image (figure 2a) pictures the Mythic Being staring aggressively at a man who reads over his shoulder, and the subsequent ones (figures 2b–e) depict, what looks to be, a staged-for-the-camera mugging.64 In the project, narratives of cross-dressing coalesce with those of passing and with Piper’s lived experience as racially ambiguous. Cross-dressing is typically understood as an individual donning the appearance, clothing, and behaviors of the other gender. Passing is an example of self-fashioning that, in the American context, has been commonly understood as a lightskinned black person choosing to identify or “pass” as white. Historically, individuals were motivated to pass in order to escape the consequences of racial injustice and pursue the social, economic, political, and legal privileges traditionally accorded to whites. Piper addressed these very topics in her installation piece Cornered (1988) and an essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” written in 1992.65 In both works, the artist provided a history of the myriad instances of passing that occur in literature and even in her own family, while explaining her own reasons for not passing and critiquing the power imbalances that made passing necessary. When Piper performed the Mythic Being, she joined the ranks of other Adrian Piper

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light-skinned black women who mounted the twin disguises of race and gender. The memoirs Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William Craft (1860) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861) describe how passing cross-dressers were able to seize a measure of freedom and mobility through boundary-crossing actions.66 Craft’s Running chronicles the joint escape of the author and his wife from slavery through ethnic impersonation and cross-dressing: he dressed and behaved as manservant to his wife Ellen, while she cross-dressed as, and passed for, an invalid white man.66 Ellen’s portrayal of race, gender, class, and physical infirmity enabled the couple to travel northward to safety and freedom. In Incidents, Harriet Jacobs explained that her alter-ego, Linda Brent, “wore sailor’s clothes,” “blackened [her] face with charcoal,” and assumed the appearance of a man by “putting [her] hands in [her] pockets” and “walk[ing] ricketty [sic].”67 By assuming the color, dress, and behavior of a free black sailor, the (light-skinned) slave woman was able to walk through her town unrecognized and slip away to a boat that was supposed to carry her north to freedom. Passing and cross-dressing narratives like these are structured around the representation of identity categories as fixed and stable, yet they emphasize the permeability of the boundaries that define identity. In some respects, Piper’s performance as the Mythic Being was like Ellen Craft’s and Linda Brent’s in that she sought to overcome the limitations imposed on her through visual identifications and to expand herself through her crossing of racial, gender, and class boundaries. In another respect, however, her performance was hardly comparable in that Craft and Brent executed their masquerades because their very lives were at stake. Though done in earnest, Piper’s performance was playful. That playfulness is particularly evident in the final image of “Mythic Being: Getting Back” (see figure 2e). It should read as the Mythic Being’s standing menacingly over his victim, but instead it registers as the artist gazing smilingly over her shoulder to address the photographer and camera. The directness with which Piper stares at the photographer and viewer makes her visible as herself in spite of her disguise. Piper calls attention to her direction of the action, to herself as the force behind the work’s making, and above all, to her subjectivity as artist-author. Here, too, are clues regarding the artist’s stance vis-à-vis the use and perpetuation of stereotypical narratives surrounding black masculinity.68 The staged-ness of the mise-en-scène implicates the audience in the pro-

cess of making Mythic Being. That Piper, as artistic director, employs the Brechtian move of pulling back the curtains on the “documentation” of the performance reveals to the audience its role in constituting the iconographic character of Mythic Being. Piper set up an artificial assault for viewers to see; they, she seems to suggest, are responsible for breathing life into the creature. Piper’s performance of outlandish actions, appropriation of the figure of the black male, and the overdetermined narratives that attend it demonstrate a calculated playfulness that suggests a kinship with the nineteenthcentury minstrel tradition, an affinity that is also evident in the projects of the other artists studied in this book. In his book Love and Theft, Eric Lott defined minstrelsy as the practice of white men performing character types based on exaggerated representations of blackness for white audiences.69 To achieve their representations of exaggerated blackness, minstrel players blackened up by applying greasepaint or burnt cork to their skin, dressed in the ill-fitting and outmoded costumes that audiences associated with slaves, and performed exaggerated behaviors that were assigned to slave culture.70 Lott argued that minstrel shows performed two functions: they allowed middle-class performers to assume a version of black masculinity in order to shake off their middle-class pretensions, and they solidified working-class audiences’ self-definitions as distinct from both the upper classes and the black masses with whom they competed for work and respect.71 Crucially, white minstrel players never meant to pass as the black men they impersonated in their hyperbolic performances. They relished their unlikeness from their characters, just as Piper took pleasure in her difference from the Mythic Being. In the photographs of “Mythic Being: Getting Back,” Piper’s own body outperformed the male body she attempted to assume, so she was not able to successfully pass into her male persona.72 Instead of an image that suggests an aggressive exchange, the first photograph (figure 2a) shows Piper and Auerbach standing closer to one another than would generally be tolerated by strangers. Their proximity underscores their familiarity and collaboration. And because of the artist’s small stature, Piper-as-Mythic Being is dwarfed by the other two men in the frame. Rather than “documenting” the aggressive assault of a white man by a black, the next four images (figures 2b–e) reveal Piper as too petite and slight to overtake a man who is significantly taller and heavier than she. Actually, the photographs themselves illustrate the instability that is Adrian Piper

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the foundation of all such boundary-crossing performances. For instance, the images do not help the viewer assess whether Piper’s actions functioned in the ways the artist intended—that is, does the audience witness her make a successful claim to “the masculine side of herself”—but they certainly evince the playful and fictional qualities of the actions. Likewise, the photographs document and record the Mythic Being performance which Piper enacted, yet because it is a staged attack of a white man by a black man that is documented, in the end they serve only to parody the conventions of on-the-scene news photography, mocking how such an event would be characterized by the media. “The Mythic Being: Getting Back” demonstrates that passing seamlessly into black masculinity was not Piper’s goal in this series, and the same can be said of Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee, who also took pleasure in their simultaneous sameness to and difference from their assumed identities. The importance of these projects lies in their ability to spotlight the negotiation or becoming of identity, hint at the audience’s participation in the making and taking of identifications, and model for viewers a liminal state wherein one can be self and other at the same time. Yet, displaying one’s difference from an assumed identity, especially through overdetermined and iconographical narratives threatens to disempower the subject, even while empowering and authorizing the artist to make her own identity. All of the projects studied here walk this tightrope.

Linking Performativity, Process, and Perception Piper’s use of stereotypical narratives surrounding black masculinity for the Mythic Being performances certainly suggests a healthy selfreferentiality, but the series also demonstrates her understanding that the outside world (her audience) and the social context in which she lived shaped her identity. She came to terms with those realizations when she wrote, “as a human being any identity I may assume seems to depend largely on my interaction with other human beings.”73 She admitted that “the outside world” held some sway over her in that it infiltrated her awareness, shaping her identity and her work in ways that confronted her with the politics of her position whether she wanted them to or not (31–32). “Like everyone else,” she concluded, “I am a paradigm of this society. This society’s treatment of me shows me what I am, and in the products of my labor I reveal the nature of the society, whether I intend to or not” (40).

These passages reveal her increased recognition that the creation of identifications is a complex dynamic involving self-volition and participation, the external application of socially prescribed expectations, and exterior determinants. In her understanding that society inevitably shapes behaviors and identifications, Piper located the discourse of identity that Simone de Beauvoir described as socially constructed in The Second Sex (1953) and that Judith Butler conceived in Gender Trouble (1990). Rather than understanding “feminine” and “masculine” as essential and stable categories to which women and men “naturally” belong, Butler’s theory of performativity sees gender as a “set of free floating attributes” created by society, which individuals perform in order to assume and maintain identity.74 Piper’s Mythic Being suggests that the artist understood that templates of being exist into which society molds individuals and that individuals are then responsible for maintaining those modes of being through repeated performance. Indeed, the notion that identity is performative—that one acts out an identity in order to become it—is one of the critical foundations of all of the projects considered in this book. Let us turn to Piper’s exploration of the performativity of identity in the series “Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” (1974) (figures 7a–b). The work consists of ten sequential photo-drawings, all of which share the same original—a photo portrait of Piper and another young woman that looks like it was made in a photo booth. The young, round-faced artist is positioned in the lower left portion of the frame, and the head of a young white woman appears over the artist’s right shoulder. Onto each work, Piper drew a speech balloon, and over the course of the ten pieces, she described an experience that was pivotal for her personal, artistic, and intellectual development. The text of the story is this: Piper’s close friendship with a young woman was compromised when the latter betrayed her by stealing her boyfriend. The more significant subtext is this: Piper “learned a lot from her [friend] about how to flirt, how to be engagingly feminine, how to act in a socially confident and poised manner.”75 The experience allowed her to comprehend more fully the performative nature of identity: “engagingly feminine,” “confident,” and “poised” behaviors are not natural but studied. Piper recalled picking them up “by simply copying some of her [friend’s] mannerisms and behavior” just as her friend “had copied from her older and very sophisticated sister” (126). She became aware that feminine behaviors did not originate with her friend or even with her friend’s sister. Adrian Piper

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The behaviors were copied from anonymous, distant sources, including film, media, and society, and subsequently passed along through performance. If the textual portions of “The Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” detail how Piper came to understand the performative nature of identity, the images visualize the performative process, which constitutes the becoming of identity. Over the course of the ten works, Piper drew dark curly hair on her head, turning her own long straight hairstyle into a full curly Afro. She also added hair to her normally clear face. She sketched dark sunglasses onto her face, shaded her skin darker, and inserted a cigar in her mouth.

7a & 7b Adrian Piper, Selections from The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 1974, black and white photograph, ink, 8 x 5 in. each of ten, collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999 © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin

The transition from Piper to the Mythic Being is marked visually. As the artist’s identity dematerializes, she fades to black, and, at the same time that the character materializes, he gets darker. In that way, Mythic Being overtakes Piper’s identity. The work reveals Piper’s roots in conceptual art, especially its accent on process and its emphasis on the dematerialization of the art object. The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, in his foundational essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” was perhaps first to articulate the prioritization of the process of, and idea behind, art making over the end product in conceptual art.76 Lucy Lippard echoed these sentiments when she wrote in “Escape AtAdrian Piper

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tempts” that conceptual art is a practice in which “the idea was paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious or ‘dematerialized’.”77 The materiality and final product of works of art were deemphasized or dematerialized, Lippard explained, because conceptual artists were concerned with “art as idea and art as action” and not with its monetary exchange value.78 By the late 1960s, Adrian Piper was actively producing dematerialized objects that pushed the boundaries of art making. Indeed, she had a demonstrated relationship with alternate venues of exhibition and modes of delivery. For instance, for her first solo exhibition, Piper’s artwork consisted in a mimeographed booklet that was published by Vito Acconci’s and Rosemary Mayer’s 0 to 9 Press. She distributed the product by mailing it directly to audience members’ addresses rather than gathering a group of objects in the physical space of a gallery.79 In that way, she effectively bypassed the gallery and museum system that governs an artist’s exposure by mailing her exhibition directly to the target audience and controlling their consumption of her work. Similarly, the artist bought ad space in the Village Voice to announce the exhibition of her work, held in March 1969, that the 0 to 9 Press published, and a couple of months later, she placed one of her “Area Relocation” pieces in the “Gallery” section of the same newspaper.80 By the launch of the Mythic Being series in 1973, Piper had also used performance as a way to circumnavigate the gallery and museum system and distribute her artworks, participating in the festival of street art organized by the Village Voice art critic John Perreault in the spring of 1969 and mounting the Catalysis and Food for the Spirit actions in 1970 and 1971, respectively.81 With her utilization of the performance genre, exploitation of the mail system and mass-media outlets as a means of distribution, and employment of untraditional and so-called low media, Piper already had a proven record in producing dematerialized objects, circumventing the gallerymuseum system, and skirting the art commodity structure. Yet “Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” is still remarkable because the artist combined conceptual art strategies with a concern for identity. She effectively visualized and made manifest the dematerialization of one object and the materialization of another: in this case, the object is identification. Indeed, the artist dematerialized the object—herself—in “Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” at the same time that she pictured and thus emphasized the process of her transformation “into a different person,” the fictional male persona.82 In other

words, she called attention to the disappearance of herself and accentuated the appearance of the new identity. Piper took the “art as action” route and actively inserted her body: she became artist, process, and artwork. She emphasized the transformative process in “The Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” and demonstrated her understanding that the artist, her process, and her work had to be collapsed into a single entity: “The work is a product, or a final part of the process, rather than the embodiment of the process; but the artist is the embodiment of that particular process” (33). Piper also described the process of dematerializing her identification and becoming that of the Mythic Being in some of her journal entries from the time; they chronicle the artist’s claiming of her own masculinity through the performative process of enacting heterosexual masculinity. Piper listed iconographic behaviors—some physical and others psychosexual—that she thought were socially acceptable for and germane to straight men. She recalled that her “behavior” changed when she wore the costume: “I swagger, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia” (117). She recounted following women with her eyes on the street, “fantasizing vivid scenes of lovemaking and intimacy” (118). The artist did not take up the notion that such behaviors and fantasies might be evaluated differently based on an individual man’s ethnic, racial, class, and sexual identifications. The Mythic Being performances enabled Piper to depart from her own learned behavior and to trespass the boundaries of patriarchal and heterosexist feminine conventions. Through them she was able to experience gender and sexuality differently. Adopting the persona allowed the artist to experience sexual attraction to other women and be “unencumbered by [her] usual feminine suspicions of them as ultimately hostile competitors for men” (118). “I found the guise of the Mythic Being allowed me,” she continued, “to express as art many of my actual feelings of macho masculinity toward my male friends that even the women’s movement hadn’t facilitated” (147). Such passages suggest that the performances also enabled her to claim what she perceived to be a shared gender identity with men as well as with her “very strong aggressive streak” (147). The Mythic Being performances facilitated her feeling that “masculinity . . . [was] very nearly fully articulated in [her]” and precipitated her imagining a different existence if she had been a man (123).83 Temporarily inhabiting masculinity permitted her to engage “tenuous feelings of kinship with men” and to “envision the Adrian Piper

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possibility of deep love relationships based on friendship, trust, camaraderie, masculine empathy” (118). Piper described these performative appropriations as “pleasurable behavioral reinforcement,” as transgressive behaviors that produced the pleasurable effect of allowing her to dispense with old conduct and acquire new ways of being (123). “Mythic Being: I/You (Her)” and the passages describing Piper’s claiming of her masculine identity demonstrate that the artist did not have allegiance to any one identity discourse. On the one hand, her accessing of stereotypical narratives about heterosexual masculinity and black masculinity suggests that she adhered to radical essentialist theories that posited identity as natural, universal, and fixed. On the other hand, her emphasis on the becoming of identity indicates that she understood identity as socially mandated and performative, as a set of preestablished behaviors that one was compelled to act out in order to claim and assume a new identification. Even if Piper was ambivalent toward these theories of identity, the performances fostered her realization that identity and audience reception are inextricably linked: she needed an audience in order to ratify, or at least witness, whatever identity she chose to assume and perform. The audience for the Mythic Being performances was largely imaginary. Indeed, the project’s actions were mounted in spaces, whether private or public, that did not fall under the rubric of “art venues.” It follows that most viewers were not affiliated with the art world, they were unaware that they were audience to Piper’s performances, and as a result, they did not record descriptions of, or reactions to, her art actions. Nevertheless, audience played a prominent role in the Mythic Being series, and the artist’s concern for audience comes from several sources, chief among them her foundations in philosophy, conceptual art, and minimalism. As a Kantian philosopher, Piper is well versed in the theories of selftranscendence that Immanuel Kant put forth in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant proposed that rational objectivity could be attained only when one distanced oneself from one’s individual identity, desires, and connections. In effect, Kant advocated that one become “other” to oneself so that one might be audience to oneself. The other projects under discussion in this book by Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, and Anna Deavere Smith share the same interest in achieving “otherness” to oneself, however their inspirations did not derive from Kant, as did Piper’s. The practice of yoga and the theory of phenomenology have also been influential to Piper’s conceptualization of audience in relation to the Mythic

Being project.84 Introduced by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, transcendental phenomenology references a philosophical movement that is committed to describing the essence of experience.85 Phenomenological study enables individuals to refer to objects outside themselves. Building on Husserl’s notion “to the things themselves,” Maurice MerleauPonty, the French existential phenomenologist-philosopher whose work was championed by minimalist artists, emphasized the importance of the physical body in the perception and acquisition of knowledge and experience.86 He encouraged practitioners to scrutinize outside objects singularly in order to merge with them and realize their uniqueness. The works studied in this book testify to their makers’ attention to phenomenology and their interest in merging with objects outside themselves. As an artist who began her practice in the mid- to late 1960s, Piper was undoubtedly inspired by the art of minimalists whose ideas were swayed by phenomenology. Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith all worked from the phenomenological method, placing value on viewers’ physical reactions to objects in space. “Three dimensions are real space,” opined Judd, “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”87 Similarly, Morris asserted that the best sculptural work is “a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.”88 He advised artists to take “control of and/or cooperation of the entire situation” because “control is necessary if the variables of object, light, space, body, are to function.”89 Morris believed that “phenomenological formalism was of the utmost importance” and that the spectator should be “aware . . . that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context.”90 He insisted on the importance of scale or “the relationship of the viewer’s body to this thing [art object]” because the viewer’s “body [would] encounter” the artworks “optical[ly] and physical[ly].”91 Tony Smith summed up the minimalist point of view with the simple statement “you just had to experience it.”92 Piper’s triptych “The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter” (1975) (plates 3a–c) demonstrates how effective she was in marrying the largely apolitical minimalist strategy of phenomenology to her increasing socialpolitical concerns for identity. The photographs show a privately staged performance in which Piper appears as the persona. Out of a dark background emerges the figure of the Mythic Being. He wears a version of the Mythic Being uniform: curly Afro and facial hair, dark sunglasses, a short Adrian Piper

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sleeve t-shirt, and pants. The first image (see plate 3a) is taken from below, which gives the figure the appearance of increased stature. Left hand extended, he directs his palm, with fingers spread, at the viewer. His body language communicates a message of “do not trespass” as he looks down at the photographer and the viewer. A cloud of smoke, which also functions as a thought balloon, hovers over his right shoulder, and the text within reads, “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE.” In the second panel (see plate 3b), the Mythic Being is depicted in a three-quarter-length pose. His left arm is crossed over his ribs, his right arm bends upward, and the cigar he holds between his index and middle fingers points toward a smoky thought balloon. Glancing down his nose at the viewer, the character says, “IF WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TO ME.” In the final panel (see plate 3c), the Mythic Being wears the same clothes and strikes the same pose he did in the second. Motioning upward, he states, “IS WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO FOR ME.” Piper used written language and gestural expression to address and act out against the audience in “The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter.” Her language requires that the viewer put the phrases together: “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE IF WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TO ME IS WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO FOR ME.” The confrontational text uses the floating pronoun “you” directly, which allows the viewer to interpret it personally, as though the Mythic Being is addressing her or him specifically. The framing of the images automatically puts viewers in a submissive position.93 They are required to gaze up at the large, imposing, and intimidating figure of the Mythic Being who is glaring down at them. Functioning as a surrogate for Piper, the Mythic Being takes the offensive position, in order to gain control first, “It doesn’t matter who you are.” He, like Piper, assumes that the viewer will attempt “to do things to him” and control him. When he says, “Is what I want you to do for me,” he seems to have come to the same conclusion that Piper reached through the Mythic Being works. The power to make and assert identity is, at least partly, mutual: one party must actively negotiate identity, and the other party must provide an audience to witness the identity. In that case, neither party possesses or abdicates control. Piper’s understanding that she, as both artist and artwork, should affect people was perhaps best articulated in her “Art as Catalysis” essay, in which she expressed her belief that art “is a catalytic agent . . . that . . . promotes a change in another entity.”94 She took her minimalist predecessors’

work with discrete objects to the next logical step, inserting her own physical presence into the place an object would otherwise occupy. That Piper’s black and female body was “the catalyzing agent” should not be underestimated or overlooked, for she determined that she would employ it—or more appropriately, her self—to make “the strongest impact . . . of human confrontation” on “the passive . . . viewer” (32). “Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter” rehearses Piper’s growing realization that identity and audience (reception) are inextricably linked. In order to acquire an identity, one requires an other. Effectively, Piper forced viewers to acknowledge her performance of identity, to recognize her not as an object to be evaluated but as a subject authorized to devise a self according to her political and philosophical principles.

Acting out and Acting on the Audience, or, Examining the Subject/Object Divide Piper’s explorations of identity, reception, and subject/object relations in the Mythic Being performances correspond uncannily to the theory of double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois put forth in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois explained that black people understood that white people regarded them as problems, “as a sort of seventh son,” and that they were shut out of the white “world by a vast veil.”95 Du Bois recalled acquiring knowledge of both the existence of this other world and his exclusion from it when, as a boy, a white classmate refused to accept the visiting card he offered in friendship. At that moment, he realized that the “Negro” was “gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”96 Du Bois explained that the “peculiar sensation” of “doubleconsciousness”—the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eye of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”—influenced the identities of black people: a critical audience had been built into their psyches.97 “One ever feels his twoness,” he continued, “—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”98 As he saw it, the problem centered on a disjointed and inaccurate point of view: the interior view one has of one’s self could never be reconciled with the exterior view the “other” has of one’s self. Du Bois put a finer point on it Adrian Piper

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when he wrote that while the Negro longed “to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” he wished, “neither of the older selves to be lost.”99 “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.”100 The matter of coming to terms with one’s self as subject and object is the same project Piper set for herself in the Mythic Being performances. Like Du Bois, who wrote that the Negro “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly on his face,” the artist also wanted to claim and maintain her multiple and intersected identifications.101 Yet, whereas Du Bois sought to rid himself and other blacks of the internalized critical audience that predicated double-consciousness, Piper sought to contain the “other,” the critical audience within her. In other words, the audience was the “other” she sought to become and contain. She seemed to think that containing the critical audience would facilitate her understanding of the discrimination she encountered as a result of the particularity of her identity and would enable the spiritual function of transcending the boundaries of her specific self. One of Piper’s journal entries about an experience she had while working as a disco dancer sheds light on her quest to transcend her own identifications by merging with outside objects.102 Working as an entertainer in a nightclub, Piper danced in a cage that was surrounded by mirrors and customers. Her attention to the music and rhythm induced a trancelike state that infused her perceptions “with almost ineffable significance . . . whatever [she] experience[ed] was so real, so ineluctably meaningful, so aggressively itself,” that she nearly lost herself (96). Piper described taking an “almost mystical pleasure” in losing herself to the music: her body had “taken over” (97). The artist underwent an in-body experience in which the phenomenology of her body took over, and her criticism and scrutiny of herself dropped away. Piper recalled feeling “free” and “terrifically powerful and untired,” and even though she “had abdicated conscious control,” she felt “more control than ever before” (97). That powerful in-body experience ended, however, when the artist saw herself in a mirror and noticed her movements and appearance. At that point, she felt as though she was no longer in her body. Rather she be-

came an “other,” surveying the body of Adrian Piper. She identified a second “other,” the audience, whom she feared would lose interest in her and her dancing. At that point, the artist experienced a shock that marked her “transition in and out of (critical) self-consciousness” (97). She remembered feeling as though a “war” raged inside her: “The war was between a spectator who evaluated and tried to determine the contingent movements of my body, and the part of me that had abandoned control of my body, to my body and its instincts. The war was . . . between the audience and the object of perception, both aspects of my consciousness” (97). The moment of faltering marked her “sudden critical self-consciousness,” when her critical consciousness assumed control (97). When Piper called to mind her feelings of being “divided” and “enervated,” she described an acute feeling of double consciousness like the one Du Bois identified decades earlier (97). Even though Piper linked critical consciousness both to herself and the audience, she did not accord the same negative associations to double consciousness that Du Bois did. Instead, the Mythic Being series reflects Piper’s simultaneous endeavor to understand outside perception and act out against the audience whose perceptions shaped her. In that respect, Piper’s use of alternate media, exhibition spaces, and modes of distribution was driven by several motives: her interest in the “information-disseminating capacities” of particular formats; her cynicism about “the recondite and elitist character of contemporary art”; and her discontent with “the failure of communication between the arteducated and the non-art-educated [which is] closely related to the . . . socioeconomic discrepancies that exist between rich and poor” (120–22).103 Likewise, her appropriation of the single-panel comic format in the Mythic Being advertisements had multiple agendas. It was more than an infiltration of “low,” “popular” art into the commercial space of “high” art, more than an effort to make her work “as accessible as comic books or television,” and more than a sly and erudite nod at the seriality that was prevalent in art practices of the time (122). Piper was, without a doubt, motivated by an artistic, social, and political yearning to impact the audience. Two distinct audiences—both those specific to the art world and the “nonspecialized” viewers—held particular appeal for Piper, and publishing her Mythic Being ad-works in the Village Voice allowed her to reach both.104 During those years the Village Voice was an organ for leftist and counterculture politics.105 Its circulation of approximately 145,000 was Adrian Piper

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eight times that of the popular art magazine Artforum and thirty times that of the special-interest art magazine Avalanche.106 Known for its support of the civil rights and women’s rights movements and its condemnation of the Vietnam War, the Voice was widely read by left-leaning individuals, liberal intellectuals, and artists of various stripes. In short, the newspaper offered Piper a way to reach an “educated and intellectual but nonspecialized” audience.107 At the same time, the Voice found an especially attentive readership in the New York art community because its weekly distribution gave it the sense that its articles, advertisements, reviews, and columns, especially John Perreault’s “Art” were very up to date, in contrast to the monthly or roughly quarterly publication schedules of many art magazines.108 Thus, while the Mythic Being ad-works were seen by a “nonspecialized” audience—and we might see correlations between this audience and the nonart-world audiences that saw Mythic Being performances—they were also encountered by an art-specialized audience as well. It is safe to assume, then, that a fair number of Piper’s target audience of counterparts and colleagues in the art world saw the Mythic Being ad-works, if only inadvertently, as a result of reading articles and exhibition announcements in the Voice. With her ad-works in the Voice, Piper participated in a larger trend in which artists communicated to each other (and potential patrons) via spots placed in art-specific publications. Many artists used photographs of themselves, rather than of their art, as publicity, and in retrospect, those advertisements suggest that gender identification, gender conventions, and sexual identity were major topics of exploration. Some of the advertisements announced upcoming exhibitions: Judy Chicago’s fullpage Artforum advertisement from 1970 in which she appears as a boxer in a fighting ring; Hannah Wilke’s ad from the summer 1972 issue of Avalanche in which she works at a table, wearing only a shirt, panty hose, and boots; Lynda Benglis’s full-page ad from the April 1973 issue of Artforum in which she takes an aggressive posture in front of her Porsche; and Robert Rauschenberg’s centerfold ad from the December 1974 issue of Artforum that shows him in a pose that can be interpreted as either flirtatious or confrontational.109 Others—such as Ed Ruscha’s spot “Say Goodbye to College Joys” from the January 1967 issue of Artforum featuring the artist in a bed sandwiched between two women, Marjorie Strider’s Avalanche winter 1972 ad in which she appears bare-breasted and riding a horse, and Beng-

lis’s controversial Artforum advertisement from November 1974 in which she appears nude brandishing a dildo—do not announce exhibitions but instead seem to promote the artist as a specifically gendered personality.110 The Mythic Being ad-work (figure 8) from the 3 January 1974 issue of the Voice demonstrates that Piper also partook in the trend by forcing viewers to grapple with their expectations about gender identity. It features the same photograph of Piper wearing the Mythic Being uniform, but the text is different. It reads, “NO MATTER HOW MUCH I ASK MY MOTHER TO STOP BUYING CRACKERS, COOKIES AND THINGS, SHE DOES ANYWAY, AND SAYS IT’S FOR HER EVEN IF I ALWAYS EAT IT. SO I’VE DECIDED TO FAST. 12–12–64.” If the first advertisement that Piper placed in the Village Voice made assessing the Mythic Being’s gender difficult, then such later examples would only further the confusion. Again, the figure appears to be male, but the passage, written when Piper was sixteen-yearsold, seems to wrestle with a body-image issue that was seen as a typically female concern. This ad, like others, consciously plays with how narratives are placed into iconographic boxes by viewers. Piper’s ad-works represent a significant departure from the above examples. The most obvious difference is that her works are smaller and more modest than her colleagues’ large-scale advertisements, probably due to financial constraints.111 Other meaningful differences are that in her advertisements Piper appears in costume and under the cloak of an assumed personality rather than as herself, and she is not in some stage of undress.112 Perhaps most importantly, Piper was absent and present simultaneously: the disguise rendered her anonymous so she could act out in aggressive ways and voice sentiments that she might otherwise have kept confidential; and yet she was visible, articulating her own thoughts and ideas. The artist’s assertion of her self as embodying a particular set of raced, gendered, sexual, and class positions and declaration of her authority to make art and have it recognized are deeply significant, especially given the limited foothold that individuals like her are generally granted. The placement of the ad-works on the newspaper page (figure 8) suggests that, beyond using publications as an alternate mode of distribution, they were a way for Piper to insert herself into her work and publicize it in the art world. Though one must assume that Piper had little power to determine the work’s position on the printed page and that its location was subject to the whims of the editorial staff, one cannot help but see that her work is wedged between advertisements for exhibitions by members Adrian Piper

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8 Village Voice newspaper page from 3 Jan. 1974 containing Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 12/12/64, #4 of seventeen, 147/8 in. x 111/2 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin



9 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 4/12/68, 1974, Village Voice newspaper ad of 25 April 1974, #8 of seventeen, 14 7/8 in. x 111/2 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin

of the art-world establishment. Nor can one ignore the humor and irony of the ad’s placement: Piper appears in drag (á la Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy) and airs private issues relating to body image just a few inches away from a photograph of Marcel Duchamp that illustrates an article about a retrospective exhibition of the work of the grandpère of conceptual art on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Inadvertently, Piper was provided an opportunity to establish her artistic lineage and publicize her value as an artist. The advertisement Piper placed in the 25 April 1974 issue of the Village Voice (figure 9) takes another step in the same direction, as it signals the artist’s unprecedented control over the form, content, and regularity of the distribution of her work while broadcasting her kinship with respected and recognized artists. In it, Piper appears under cover of disguise—and this time, for good reason. For the text reads, “I REALLY WISH I HAD A FIRMER GRIP ON REALITY. SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE BETTER IDEAS THAN ANYONE ELSE AROUND WITH THE EXCEPTION OF SOL LEWITT AND POSSIBLY BOB SMITHSON, WHOSE IDEAS I REALLY RESPECT. 4-1268.” This is an important instance of double-voicedness in which Piper can speak as herself and as “other” simultaneously, and it is made possible by the racial and gender ambiguity and anonymity of the Mythic Being cosAdrian Piper

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tume. The artist dialogues with and pays homage to her more senior and better-known colleagues Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, who had also distributed art through publications.113 At the same time, she “acts out” at them and anyone else who might see and read, announcing that the ideas behind her work are “better” than those of her art-world counterparts. This is a significant instance of how Piper affirms her artistic merit and asserts an empowered politics of identity through the Mythic Being project.

Conclusion Piper’s “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus” (1975) (figures 10a–e), consisting of five hand-worked photographs in which the Mythic Being works his way through a crowded crosswalk in Harvard Square, instantiates the consciousness of “other” that Piper sought through her persona-play performances. Shot from the opposite side of the street, the first photograph (figure 10a) shows the character among a group of pedestrians. He appears small and would be lost in the crowd if a white cloud in which the words “I AM THE LOCUS OF CONSCIOUSNESS” did not hover over his head. The second image (figure 10b) was shot from the middle of the crosswalk. It shows the figure standing in the path of passersby and smoking a cigar. Piper drew a thought-balloon over the Mythic Being’s head and wrote the words, “SURROUNDED AND CONSTRAINED” in it. The persona occupies the center of the third photograph (figure 10c). He walks in the same direction as other pedestrians and has a cigar in mouth. His thought is “BY ANIMATE PHYSICAL OBJECTS.” In the fourth image (figure 10d), he turns to face the camera by walking against the crowd. White light emanates from him in streaks and obscures those near him. The text “WITH MOIST, FLESHY, PULSATING SURFACES” floats above his head. The Mythic Being is the only recognizable figure in the final photograph (figure 10e). Piper shaded over the other pedestrians with a black crayon as if to respond to the Mythic Being’s order “GET OUT OF MY WAY, ASSHOLE.” Piper’s sequencing of the five photographs does not picture an egalitarian, neutral interaction between two parties, nor does it direct the audience’s interpretation. One way to interpret “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus,” however, is to imagine that the Mythic Being is the empowered subject and agent of the photograph. In that case, viewers who take the position of the photographer are the objects onto which the persona gazes. He approaches viewers in an aggressive way, and his language and thoughts

10a–10e Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus #1–5, 1975, one of five black and white photographs over‑ drawn with oil crayon, 8 x 10 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin and collection of Smart Museum, Chicago

are confrontational and solipsistic. After all, he understands himself to be “the locus of consciousness” and the embodiment of awareness, and he regards himself as an ideational entity conjured as and constrained by the “moist, fleshy, pulsating surfaces” that compose “physical objects.” Ultimately, the Mythic Being wants viewers to “get out of his way” so that he may continue in the manner of his choosing. Another way to interpret “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus” is to imagine the viewer, who occupies the camera’s position, as the subject and the Mythic Being as the object of scrutiny and evaluation. If the Mythic Being is the object of the spectator’s view, then the viewer is responsible for attributing the specific thoughts and language to the persona. In that case, it is the viewer who thinks of the Mythic Being as “the locus of consciousness” and the viewer who apprehends the Mythic Being as embodied through the “moist, fleshy, pulsating surfaces” with which he is “surrounded and constrained.” The direct, impolite language spelled out in the thought balloons is then actually a product of the spectator’s imagination and not the persona’s, just as the “themes of confrontation, objectification, and estrangement” that the Mythic Being is supposed to represent are in fact the viewer’s divining.114 If the character is “a static emblem of confrontation” and represents the “abstract, generalized, faintly unholy embodiment of expressed hostility, fear, anxiety, estrangement,” then it is the audience that made him so (134). Piper did not prioritize one interpretation. Indeed, having the dichotomous interpretations exist side-by-side seems to be her point, as it is an instance of double consciousness. “Mythic Being: I Am the Locus” shows what simultaneously possessing consciousness of self and consciousness of “other” looks like. This work, like the entire series, models the process of identifying with the self and the “other” of the Mythic Being for viewers. The work embodies the playfulness involved in occupying a liminal space and of being neither and both at once. With its purposefully ambivalent interpretations, “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus” demonstrates how the project mapped out the overdetermined iconographies of the young black man, while at the same time avoiding a reification of the stereotype itself. Piper employed the signs of the stereotype (Afro, dark sunglasses, clothing associated with lower-class people) in order to force viewers to connect the dots and call up the attendant narratives in their own minds. According to the logic of this defensive strategy, the audience, not the artist, was responsible for retrieving and

activating the stereotype. Yet, in mapping the constellation of signs that constitute the stereotype of the black male, the series validated it simultaneously. Unfortunately, Piper and Mythic Being are not alone in this conundrum of how to provide recognizable reference points of identifications for viewers; Antin’s, Lee’s, and Smith’s performances are also in danger of falling prey to stereotypes. Although examining how Piper and the other artists studied in this book reinscribe iconographic identities is significant to this analysis, it is crucial only insofar as it reveals the complexities inherent in making, representing, and modeling identities other than one’s own. Mythic Being demonstrates, on the one hand, that being self and “other,” subject and object, simultaneously is a valuable and lofty endeavor that can instruct viewers on how to transform their perceptions. On the other hand, the project puts Piper’s difference from the fictional persona she created on display. Mythic Being and the other projects considered in this book suggest that the flaunting of one’s difference from one’s persona is the sign of an empowered artist, one who can use the politics of identity to her advantage by assuming the authority to make art and identity, sometimes without regard for how her own power might subordinate her “other.”

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2 —

The Other “Other”​ Eleanor Antin and the Performance of Blackness

F

our people occupy the foreground of a black and white photograph of a New York sidewalk (figure 11). Scanning the image, we take in skyscrapers in the distance and moving trucks and a flag in the middle distance and ultimately focus on two figures: President Ronald Reagan in the campaign poster in the lower left corner and a woman in the right of the frame, whose odd appearance competes for our attention with that of the actor turned president. In her black wraparound dress, short jacket, and high heels, she seems conspicuously overdressed. A hat covers her long, straight hair, and large, dark sunglasses shade her eyes. Her skin tone is peculiar. Her legs are a few shades darker than the other exposed parts of her body. Her left hand, by contrast, is extremely light, while the tones of her face and chest lie somewhere between the darkness of her legs and the lightness of her hand. The woman in the right foreground is Eleanora Antinova, a fictional persona enacted by the artist Eleanor Antin. The photograph was taken in Manhattan sometime in October 1981, when Antin mounted a performance lasting twenty days in which she stepped into and lived as the character Antinova. Each day of the nearly three weeks, Antin applied dark makeup to her own fair skin in order to masquerade as

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



11 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova performance (Oct. 1980), from Being Antinova, courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, photo by Mary Swift

black. She wore the accoutrements—vintage dresses, flowing skirts, body-hugging shirts, high heel shoes, fake long nails, and dramatic facial makeup—that she thought would befit a former prima ballerina. Antin performed everyday actions—residing in a flat on affluent Central Park West, making use of laborers in the service sector, and eating at posh restaurants like the Russian Tea Room—that she thought were appropriate to the station of an ultrafeminine ballerina. Antin-as-Antinova also carried out Antin’s professional tasks, such as attending gallery and museum receptions, and speaking to undergraduates at Columbia University. At the same time, an exhibition of Antin’s work—photographs of Antinova in past roles and watercolor and ink drawings of costumes and sets by her— was on view at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery. Coincident with the life performance, the artist launched twice-weekly playlike performances, titled Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, in her exhibition space at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery. For each performance, the gallery was transformed into a makeshift sitting room, decorated with a Tiffany-style lamp, “Oriental” rug, sitting chair, and potted plants, where Antinova, whom Antin described as “Black, glamorous, and of an uncertain but advanced age, [and] very much the grand dame,” would

12  Eleanor Antin, Being Antinova

reminisce and recount tales about Diaghilev, her life, and her most famous roles.1 The Recollections events would end with Antinova, having imbibed too much sherry, despairing the loss of her youth and fame, and finally, peddling autographs, pictures, and herself to the audience. The book Being Antinova (1983) (figure 12) gathers Antin’s writings about the activities in which the character Antinova engaged during the three weeks of the life performance as well as the artist’s reflections on her experiences as this imagined identity. Containing “documentary” photographs of Antinova in Manhattan, staged “publicity” shots of Antinova in costume, and line drawings of Antinova and other dancers in ballet poses, Being Antinova reads variously as autobiographical memoir, documentary, travelogue, and daily journal. It is presented as a largely personal account in which the artist reports on how audiences reacted to the persona and reveals the intricacies of assuming a different identity, even if for a short time. If it is a constructed text, then it is also a performance—a performance of a performance, in fact, for it is a significant site where Antin exercises and negotiates her many selves. The Antinova persona appears in no less than three additional playlike performances, at least one installation, and one video. She is a complicated character whose unreal experiences derive from the events of real people and whose knotty story unravels just long enough to keep viewers engaged.2 Eleanor Antin

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The Antinova project certainly demonstrates Antin’s skill as a researcher: she knows enough about ballet, Diaghilev, and the Ballets Russes among other topics to collage them into a realistic milieu. Similarly, she effectively appropriates the life events of actual persons, like the Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief and the African American ballerina Raven Wilkinson, who joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1942 and 1954 respectively, and binds them together with fictional stories associated with archetypal and stereotypical characters.3 Antin’s storytelling talent is undeniable: the predicaments in which Antinova finds herself seem to be real enough. In other words, we can imagine that a black woman dancer would gain fame and notoriety in Europe even while she was being typecast and marginalized because we know that Josephine Baker was; we can imagine that a black artist would leave America for Europe in search of artistic, social, cultural, and political freedom because many—Henry O. Tanner, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Archibald Motley, Mabel Mercer, William H. Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, among them—did. The Antinova series also reflects Antin’s catholic approach to artistic media and discourses. In terms of media, she happily switched between photography, film, theater, and performance, at the same time mixing the conceptualist techniques of process, documentation, and information management with the strategies of autobiography and narrative that characterized the feminist persona-play in the early to mid-1970s. There are traces of the exploration of female and male archetypes that define certain works from that period, but Antin’s knack for zany but pointed humor demonstrates an engagement with the poststructuralist theories that were gaining intellectual favor in the early 1980s. Indeed, the stories the artist imagines for Antinova do more than make viewers and readers laugh. Their complexity and excess point to a disconnect between signs and their signifieds, which, in turn, disrupts the illusion of integrity that shrouds narratives and signs of identity. To be sure, the seamlessness and completeness that had been assigned to meaning was already being deconstructed at this time, and it would have farreaching repercussions: universalisms would be dismantled, and the burden of meaning would shift from the maker to the interpreter. In making Antinova, Antin seems to have had one ear turned to the discourses of the 1970s and the other listening to those discourses that would grow more dominant in the 1980s. This chapter focuses on various pieces of the Antinova project and sug-

gests that Antin played the role of Antinova to transform herself personally, that the performances were an experiment in which she explored identifications and the development of the subjective self. I propose that Antin’s assumption of the marginal position of “other” as Antinova allowed her to distinguish herself from whiteness and to reclaim her ethnic Jewish identity. In the process of being Antin and Antinova simultaneously, the artist located an interstitial space between the identities where she could be self and “other” at once. This interstitial or liminal space, which Antin explores in Eleanora Antinova much as Adrian Piper investigated in her Mythic Being project, seems to need the public as witness and for interaction while at the same time it seems to offer a view of a utopian world without discrimination. Antinova is at the same time a deeply private, and maybe even self-centered, performance because it provides the artist the opportunity to transform herself.

One Foot In, One Foot Out Antin’s launch of the Antinova project in the late 1970s coincides with a period that has, until recently, been figured as an aesthetic, cultural, and discursive break from the feminist art practices in the 1970s. That era of feminist art, which has been characterized as essentialist and biologicaldeterminist, was replaced with the theory-oriented and intellectually heady feminist art of the 1980s. Scholars such as Helen Molesworth, and Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, among others, have pointed out in their respective texts “House Work and Art Work” (2000) and The Power of Feminist Art (1994) that such divisions are not only arbitrary and incorrect but also destructive.4 While they note that feminist art in the 1970s was likely deemed “essentialist” because some artists espoused the idea of a “universal” experience of womanhood, linking female biology to women’s behaviors (through the use of core or vaginal imagery, for example), they resist the notions that one practice is intellectually superior to another and that a chasm, both deep and wide, separates the artistic production of the two decades. Citing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, both created in 1979, as emblematic of the purported rupture because they were “asked to bear the weight of a generational split . . . [or] ‘progression’ in feminist art from essentialism to theory,”5 Molesworth shows that, more often than not, feminist artworks from the 1970s and Eleanor Antin

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1980s possess “moments of affinity and shared concerns.”6 She demonstrates that the content of Chicago’s and Kelly’s works, along with that of Mierle Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Performances (1973–74) and Martha Rosler’s Domination and the Everyday (1978), is “bound up with domesticity or maintenance and its structural relation to the public sphere”—problems that are intellectually challenging and theoretically based. In terms of form and style, the author notes that each of the four works engage “the most ‘advanced’ artistic practices of the day—Minimalism, Performance, and Conceptual art” and contribute to “the practice of Institutional Critique.”7 Like the art by Chicago, Ukeles, Kelly, and Rosler, the content of the Antinova project “permits an engagement with questions of value and institutionality that critique the conditions of everyday life as well as art”: it involves the exploration of a profession (dance) to which women were traditionally included, a critique of modern ballet’s participation in Orientalism, and the blurring of the boundaries between art and life, and the domestic and public spheres.8 Indeed, if we look to key texts from the period, we can see that Antin tackled many of the formal, intellectual, and theoretical concerns prevalent at the time. Hal Foster’s influential anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) is such a text, functioning as a sort of embedded reportage with scholars articulating how postmodernism contributes to the ways in which visual art and other cultural practices are distinguished from earlier modern and avant-garde practices. In his introduction, Foster offers a working definition of modernism so as to set the stage for postmodernism: it was an Enlightenment-based project that sought to “develop the spheres of science, morality, and art ‘according to their inner logic’,” “a cultural construction” that valued crisis and progress and capitalized on what is “oppositional” and “transgressive.”9 But he says, quoting philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who contributes an essay to the volume, “modernism seems ‘dominant but dead’.”10 Postmodernism, Foster explains, has its roots in structuralism and poststructuralism, discourses which have led culture workers to regard culture as a set of symbols and legends and to treat cultural objects as texts whose meanings are culturally and receptively contingent, rather than as works of genius and singularity. Against a reactionary and nihilist conception of postmodernism, Foster advocates “an oppositional postmodernism” that can “deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo,” that will question rather than exploit cultural codes and ex-

plore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.11 The concerns of his contributors read as a postmodern manifesto for the “anti-aesthetic”: A critique of Western representation(s) and modern “supreme fictions”; a desire to think in terms sensitive to difference (of others without opposition, of heterogeneity without hierarchy); a skepticism regarding autonomous “spheres” of culture or separate “fields” of experts; an imperative to go beyond formal filiations (of text to text) to trace social affiliations (the institutional “density” of the text in the world); in short, a will to grasp the present nexus of culture and politics and to affirm a practice resistant both to academic modernism and political reaction.12 Foster’s articulation of postmodernism overlooks the specifics of identity, even while he contributes to the enunciation of the politics of identity by advocating a postmodernism that resists antagonism among different groups and sees difference without privileging one form over another.13 Published first in Foster’s anthology and later in the collection Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1992), Craig Owens’s essay “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” elaborates on postmodernism’s goal of dismantling master narratives. He posits, significantly, that feminism and feminist art best embody the principles of Foster’s “anti-aesthetic” by promoting what he deems to be its major thrust, that is, “the insistence of difference and incommensurability.”14 Noting that feminist artists seize representations of women to explore “what representation does to women” and critique the grand stories of female sexuality and femininity, Owens recognizes that the strategies are based in poststructuralist deconstruction but asserts that they are poststructuralist with a difference.15 These strategies do not just deconstruct language, meaning, and representation but also emphasize the historical phenomenon of women’s exclusion from representing themselves and call attention to their being subjected to, and being subjects of, representation. For instance, he interprets Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) as more than an example of male fantasy, as, he says, Benjamin Buchloh would have it, but as a critique of the idea that woman “exists only as a representation of masculine desire.”16 Likewise, Owens dismisses Douglas Crimp’s interpretation that Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is an attack on the idea of the auteur, reasoning instead that her works show femininity to be a masquerade and that they illustrate

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“the trembling around the edges of identity”—an analysis that has become de rigueur.17 The author’s final example of postmodernism with a difference is Barbara Kruger’s Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (1981–83). Casting aside Foster’s earlier analysis of the work as a reification of the equivalence of “aesthetic reflection and the alienation of the gaze,” Owens argues instead that it critiques the gendered positionality of the gaze and points to the instability of gender identity itself.18 In Owens’s estimation, the best postmodern art insists that difference matters and resists the impulse to explain away difference in the service of privilege. The Antinova project may, at first glance, appear to be visually, stylistically, and intellectually related to the persona-play performances of the 1970s even as it stands apart from the work of artists such as Sherman, Kruger, Lawler, Levine, Rosler and Birnbaum that Owens cites in his essay. However, its complex content, interrogation of form and media, and engagement with myriad discourses places it firmly and resolutely on the fence, gripping formal strategies and discursive elements that have characterized each practice. Antin’s relationship to conceptual art is particularly significant in regard to her positioning on the proverbial dividing line. The Antinova project could be considered conceptual art if we accept the multifaceted definition that Lucy Lippard offers in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972: art in which the idea or concept behind it is prioritized and the materiality is de-emphasized; art that critiques and subverts the commercialism of the gallery and museum system along with the value of originality and authenticity on which such commercialism is based; art with a demonstrated interest in information systems and documentation; art that engages politics and everyday life; art that explores alternate systems of distribution and communication; art that links image to text; art that emphasizes process.19 After all, Antin subverts the gallery and museum system by working in the ephemeral medium of performance and by taking her performance directly to a nonart public; she relishes the process of performance and publishes a “record” of her activities in the book Being Antinova; and she tackles everyday life and politics by assuming an alternate identity. Yet Antin herself designates her art as “postconceptualist” not for reasons of chronology but because of her intention to undermine the authority and objectivity of the document that so many first generation conceptual artists used unquestioningly and unproblematically.20 Antin’s

relationship with the document matters most in this conception of “postconceptualism.” Rather than employing the supposedly “objective” signs of documentation usually associated with conceptual art, including graphs, grids, and equations, Antin uses a number of tactics to destabilize the authority and objectivity of the document. The entire Antinova project works to chip away at narrative integrity. She spins many stories, simultaneously relying on, and diverging from, established narratives that relate to the roles of outsider artist and expatriate artist, artistic exclusion due to racial and ethnic identity, the indignity of aging, and the humiliation of lost fame. She takes care to keep pace with some aspects of these various tales and to depart from others. Because there are aspects of Antinova’s narrative that are familiar and others that are wide of the mark, the viewer is not only thoroughly engaged but also compelled to participate, forced to connect the dots. Similarly, Antin employs and manipulates diverse signs relating to class, race, ethnicity, and profession that correspond with a signified, such as particular class level, black skin and African American identity, or dance. Despite its inability to divorce signs from their signifieds in a permanent and large-scale way, the Antinova project effectively adds frisson into the equation, demonstrating that a one-to-one relationship is not natural or given. Being Antinova, the book that was published two years after Antin’s life performance as Antinova, is particularly effective at contesting the authority of impartiality. The artist’s use of the first-person narrative and diaristic methods, as opposed to the mathematical-looking graphs or tables favored by conceptualists, underscores the personal and subjective qualities of the book to such a degree that the narrator cannot even feign objectivity. Antin’s narrator is so subjective that the reader has no choice but to take her veracity with a grain of salt. So, while the book purports to be a record or document of the performance that lasted twenty days, it also undermines its own truth-quotient at every turn. The photographs published in Being Antinova function the same way: they dispute the aura of detachment and omniscience that attends documentary photography. The images are of two types: staged photographs that mimic the conventions of dance production stills because they are shot in a studio setting with costumes, props, and backdrops, and candid photographs that parrot the conventions of documentary photography because they claim to capture the action in an uninterrupted, unrehearsed, and unmanipulated way. The aim of production stills is to portray the Eleanor Antin

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entertainer in character and to suggest the narrative thrust of the show. Antin’s production still of Antinova as Pocahontas (plate 4) embraces that goal, showing the persona playing the role of a Native American by wearing a costume that approximates the stereotype of a Native American maiden, and evoking loose narrative elements. All of those aspects of her approximation are spot on, but other aspects are purposely wrong: while fiction and simulation are part of the production-still genre, the dancers and productions are generally real, whereas Antin increases the fiction and simulation exponentially by adding her fictional dancer and production to the mix. Antin stages a mise-en-abyme performance of herself enacting Antinova and Antinova enacting the character of Pocahontas, which is in turn based on stories of an indigenous (and raced) woman who actually lived but whose life is the stuff of romantic and chauvinistic myths perpetuated by white people. At the same time, the artist points to the absurdity of production still photographs which, by their very nature, both allude to, and bracket out, actual choreography and performance. Antin’s production stills point to the ways the simulacrum reproduces itself. The “candid” photographs of Antinova conjure up the conventions of documentary photography only to complicate their supposed neutrality and impartiality. Whether showing Antinova interacting with “the help,” lunching with friends, or walking down the street, the images employ the formal language of the convention: the artist and other figures in the frame perform everyday tasks as though unaware of the photographer and camera; and the photographer captures the action using available light rather than an artificial light source and frames the scenes to communicate distance from the photographed subject. One such photograph (figure 13), taken at the legendary Russian Tea Room, purports to record Antinova’s upper-class lifestyle at the same time that it documents Antin’s performance as Antinova. In it, Antin-as-Antinova plays the part of grande dame and holds court for an audience. The white tablecloth, shiny samovar, and heavy gilt frames that glisten in the background of the photograph lend an air of luxury and expense to Antinova’s setting. Not only does the image highlight the accoutrements of Antinova’s costly glamour, such as the long, brightly polished artificial nails and ostentatious ring, but it also emphasizes the irregularity of Antin’s skin tone. Meant to be proof that Antin’s masquerade and performance as a black former ballerina were successful, the photographs show her face to be several shades darker than her hands. Antin’s makeup is not a convincing substitute for phenotypically brown

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



13 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova in the Russian Tea Room with Anna Canepa, New York City (October 1980), from Being Antinova, courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, photo by Mary Swift

skin, and it collects unevenly in awkward places. Her color is superficial, not skin deep. Ironically these documentary photographs undermine the authority and truthfulness of the convention at the same that they play up her performance of identity. And even further, Antin pulls back the curtain on the process of making the “documentary” photographs of the performance. She explains, for example, that she was very much in control of the shooting just as Piper was in the documentation of her Mythic Being street actions: she hired a photographer she thought would produce strong images and directed the photographer to photograph actions in the way she prescribed. She endeavored to employ a “hit-and-run . . . kind of shooting” rather than looking for “pregnant moments” in the hopes of capturing “the passing fancy.”21 Antin is also clear about her intentions: to depict Antinova in her “natural” environment and subsequently to communicate the glamour, nostalgia, and romance she attributed to the character. Tellingly, Antin makes a show not just of telling the reader how she created the photographic documents of Eleanor Antin

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the performance but also of conveying that the process was rocky and that the resultant photographs did not meet her expectations: the documentary images did not work for her. As a self-contained object, Antin’s Being Antinova sutures the perceived rupture between feminist art practices of the 1970s and 1980s. It does this by undermining the weighty seamlessness with which narratives are endowed; by offering up problematic master narratives that question the power of the author and the objectivity of documentary photography itself; and by disrupting the idea that identity is authentic, stable, and fixed. In so doing, the book labors against the notion that postmodern, feminist, or deconstructionist methods are mutually exclusive.

Speaking for, with, or as the “Other”? By the late 1970s, just as Antin was embarking on the Antinova project, the idea that labels—such as woman, black, or lesbian—encompassed a whole and unitary identity was under attack. Mainstream feminism had come to be regarded as monolithic and myopic, dominated by the concerns of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Feminists who at one point might have subsumed all ancillary identities under the primary heading “woman” came to realize that other identifications were equally important. Eventually, feminists recalibrated the prioritization of their identifications. An individual who formerly congregated under the heading of feminist began to mobilize her political will around her sexual, class, ethnic, and racial identifications as well. Indeed, differences relating to class, race, ethnicity, politics, and sexuality led feminists to separate into groups that would advance and advocate for their particular concerns. Antin participated in the nuancing of feminism and the politics of identity by aligning herself with difference and marking herself as “other.” Almost immediately, these feminist collectives began a dialogue, first in public addresses, then later in published books, articles, and various artistic media. Invariably, imagined and real audiences played an extremely important role because of their place in the identity-making process. Likely, collectives’ ideal audiences would have been filled with peers as interlocutors, individuals who ostensibly shared the speakers’ identifications. The fantasy of shared identification resulted in the frequent use of the firstperson pronouns “I” and “we.” Such words create a sense of shared community and express the building of affiliations and identifications. In reality,

however, their audiences were also composed of individuals who did not share their identifications and who were outside the group. For that reason, messages of complaint and contestation regularly appear in these addresses. While the diverse rhetorical approaches that the collectives took in addressing their audiences deserve their own line of research, the position and function of dialogic exchange is noteworthy here precisely because it embodies identification in the making and formulates the politics of identity as productive. By the start of the 1980s, a number of publications reflecting the ideas of these more circumscribed feminist groups appeared. They urged readers to locate their idiosyncratic and multiple identifications, to examine the oftentimes multiple oppressions they experienced as a result of their unique circumstances, and to work from the platform of those specific identities for political action and social change.22 In other words, these more particularist-minded feminists were concerned with addressing the political, social, and material consequences that attended their own positions as multiply suppressed (due to the layering of race, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and class), and they were motivated to push for change that would benefit themselves and others. The anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) is emblematic of the trend: the editors, the Chicana writers Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, gathered literature (fiction, poetry, criticism, and theory) that examines the difficulty in occupying several marginal positions at once and emphasizes the political importance in choosing to work from positions that are deemed marginal. In the foreword, the poet and playwright Toni Cade Bambara maps out the terrain of the anthology. She celebrates the effort to forge a community across ethnic, racial, class, and sexual boundaries, exclaiming how she cherishes the “gathering-in-us-ness,” the “promise of autonomy and community,” and “abundance” present in the collected writings.23 She explains that the anthology was driven by the exclusion of minoritarian feminists from majoritarian feminist practice, thought, and organization; the need “to protest, complain or explain to white feminist would-be allies”; and the authors’ desire to “fashion new networks of all the daughters of the ancient mother cultures.”24 Cade Bambara hails Native American, Latina, African American, Asian American, and Euro-American women with “Blackfoot amiga Nisei hermana Down Home Up Souf Sistuh sister El Barrio suburbia Korean The Bronx Lakota” and exhorts them “to know each other better Eleanor Antin

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and teach each other our ways, our views, if we’re to . . . get work done.”25 When revealing her excitement about the possibility of “several million women refuting the numbers game inherent in ‘minority’ . . . and denouncing the insulated/orchestrated conflict game of divide and conquer,” Cade Bambara identifies the most important part of Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s project: the possibility that minority women might flip the script and realize the strength in their numbers which would, subsequently, translate into political power and social action.26 For her preface, Moraga implements the “personal is political” approach in her political coming-of-age tale. She “recreates for [the reader] [her] own journey of struggle, growing consciousness, and subsequent politicization and vision as a woman of color.”27 In some places, the author takes an autobiographical and consciousness-raising approach, relating personal experiences revolving around difficulties with her family and feelings of guilt surrounding her appearance. In others, she details her coming to political awareness in the context of gender unity, sexual orientation, class affiliation, and discontent with oppression: the “love of women” and the agony she felt in “observing the straight-jackets of poverty and repression” drew her to politics.28 She rails against the deepest political tragedy she had experienced, “how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary,” and she calls her white sisters on this exclusion in an upfront way.29 Moraga explains that the desire not to “separate from other women” motivated her to edit the book and to make personal, political, and social partnerships across ethnic and racial boundaries with Chicana, African American, Asian American, and Native American women. While Moraga promotes universal freedom as the end, she advocates the mobilization of the multiply oppressed into a radicalized and self-actualized group as the means to realizing that goal.30 Two of the best-known texts included in the book are the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” and Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Written in 1977 by members of the Combahee River Collective, a group of black women feminists based in Boston, the statement is a political constitution delineating members’ commitment to “struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and working toward “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major sys-

tems of oppression are interlocking.”31 They located the roots of “Black feminism” in the heroic and radical acts of slave women, the personal experiences of contemporary African American women, the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, and second wave feminism, defining it as “the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”32 The methodical approach the collective took in the piece suggests that these were thoughtful women who had put their hopes and energy behind feminism only to have been excluded because of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. They were adamant about highlighting how the intersections of their multiple identifications contribute to their disempowerment, so in quick and tidy order they took to task: white middle-class feminists for their failure to understand the position of “minority” women; white men for their privileged and oppressive ways; black men for their heterosexism and chauvinism; lesbian separatists for their ideas of secession; and straight black women for their homophobia. The statement is not merely complaint, however. In it, the collective also summarized the important community organizing and social work its members performed surrounding “sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape, and health care.”33 On the level of the discursive production of the politics of identity, what is perhaps most important about the statement is its expression of the necessity for black women to work from their own subject positions: We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.34 Here, collective members favor first concentrating on how they have been multiply oppressed due to their multiple identifications and then embracing their differences as a political stance. This is strong and empowered language, in which they take a proactive posture in their commitment to their own well-being. The position they assume is anti-imperialist and anticolonialist: they are speaking for their own autonomy and authority

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and against “working to end somebody else’s oppression” even while promoting “collective process and a non-hierarchical distribution of power . . . [in] revolutionary society.”35 The remarks Audre Lorde gave at the Second Sex Conference, which convened at New York University’s Institute for the Humanities, are emblematic of the concerns addressed and goals put forward in This Bridge Called My Back and are significant to the politics of identity. In “The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde speaks unflinchingly and provocatively to her copanelists, the conference organizers and attendees, and feminists in general about the many divisions within the feminist movement. She critiques the meeting’s organizers and audience, whom she calls “academic feminists,” for inviting only two African American women to participate, for shelving matters relating to lesbians and homophobia, as well as for their failure to integrate the concerns of black and other women of color into the programming. She admonishes participants for the “mere tolerance of difference” they advocate, impelling them to disregard the advice to “ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion.” She calls on them instead to recognize “the creative function of difference.” “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”36 Such language has come to be identified with separatist navel-gazing and as a promotion of individual identity over communal identity. Yet it is crucial to understand that Lorde and others stressed the importance of difference to provide it a room of its own, to reinforce the idea that self-empowerment and autonomy are prerequisites for communal power and independence. Lorde devotes the bulk of her energy to talking back to white feminists who, she says, employ divide-and-conquer practices learned from the white patriarchal power structure.37 She denounces the implementation of such hierarchical strategies with the reminder “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”38 She concludes by suggesting an alternate strategy, derived from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting”: honesty about and understanding of the material conditions of the individual lives of different women provide the basis for political action.39 In short, she calls for a radical theory and practice based in the politics of

identity, a reinvestment in the radicalization of the “personal is political,” wherein difference matters and has meaning. Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s essay “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” published the following year in Ms., performs similar work.40 Pogrebin outlines the myriad ways that issues, such as anti-Semitism, which should have concerned the larger feminist body, were labeled as “special interest” and, subsequently, sidelined and dismissed. The author adopts a conversational tone, beginning her essay with the straightforward question, “Why now? Why write about anti-Semitism and the Women’s Movement when we have the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan to worry about?” While direct in address, the query contains a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, it expresses a preemptive defensiveness to what she calls “Jewish paranoia,” as the author reacts to the antipathy she anticipates from her audience: “Because, very simply, it’s there. And because I am a Jew who has been finding problems where I had felt most safe—among feminists.”41 Along those lines, she questions why Jews have been “omitted from the feminist litany of ‘the oppressed’,” which includes “the black woman, the Chicana, the white ethnic woman, [and] the disabled woman” among others. Why, she wonders, is the Jewish woman “not honored in her specificity?”42 On the other hand, the author also goes on the offensive: she reminds readers that anti-Semitism is not “a balanced issue,” one is either for or against hate.43 To that end, Pogrebin outlines the ways in which Jewish women’s multiple identities combine to make them multiply oppressed. She takes issue with the analogy that “women are the Jews of the world,” for example, because it not only normalizes the hardships Jews have experienced, but it also disregards how Jewish women’s intersectional ethnic, class, and sexual identities condition their experiences. She disputes stereotypical claims, such as that made by Rev. Dan C. Fore, former chair of the New York Moral Majority, “Jews have a God-given ability to make money. . . . They control the media; they control this city,” and points out that American Jews are not monolithic but diverse in their political, social, class, and economic positions and views.44 The author laments the so-called “competition of tears” in which Jewish and African American women have engaged and reminds readers that members of both groups remain disempowered and threatened. In addition to airing grievances, Pogrebin cites instances of consciousness-raising events wherein Jewish feminists gathered to

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share personal experiences of discrimination and self-hatred and to discuss the role of Jewish women in historical events. Quoting Pnina Tobin, the organizer of a consciousness-raising event in San Francisco, Pogrebin explains that such events help Jewish women “reclaim the positive qualities of the Jewish mother . . . the strength, the warmth, the characteristics of the shtetl.”45 In the end, the author employs the politics of identity to advocate for an acknowledgment that Jewish women’s identities are full and diverse as well as to urge Jewish women to repossess their complicated and intersected identifications. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by Barbara Smith, has also been deeply influential to the politics of identity because of its articulation of various positions within black lesbian feminism.46 The writing in Smith’s introduction, like that in Moraga’s preface, weaves autobiography with political manifesto and opening remarks with theoretical method. She details how the matriarchal and woman-centered environment in which she grew up serves as the basis for her belief in, and struggle for, the liberation of black women. She enumerates and dismisses “myths”—ranging from the idea that black women are already liberated to the belief that black women should prioritize racial identification over gender and sexual identification—that, she says, were put in place to keep black women from participating in feminism.47 According to Smith, the knowledge that black women, especially black lesbian feminists, experience “multiple oppressions” and are driven to act against that repression is central to the feminist texts gathered in the book, just as it is the motivation to act socially and politically on behalf of multiply oppressed women.48 She asserts that mutual comprehension of simultaneous oppression is what fosters coalitions between women of color, also called “Third World women,” at the same time that it makes “it a little easier simply to be Black and feminist.”49 Interestingly, while Smith places a great deal of significance in how different black lesbian feminists are from other feminists, she is careful to point out the diversity within the black lesbian feminist community, and she argues against any kind of separatism. Still, realizing the power of difference is central to her project, she builds on Audre Lorde’s elaboration of Simone de Beauvoir’s idea, explaining that autonomy derived from difference is “strength” whereas separatism only propagates fear.50 “When we’re truly autonomous we can deal with other kinds of people, a multiplicity of issues, and with difference, because we have formed a solid

base of strength with those with whom we share identity and/or political commitment.”51 Realizing the agency and independence that comes with the knowledge and understanding of one’s difference provides Smith the ability to support coalitions across identification boundaries and counsel against anti-Semitism and homophobia among other discriminatory practices. What is remarkable about the positions that Cade-Bambara, Moraga, Lorde, Smith, the Combahee River Collective, and others take is their advocacy of, to quote Hal Foster on postmodernism, “heterogeneity without hierarchy,” their push for autonomy among differents while not excluding others based on difference.52 For some citizen-scholars of the twenty-first century, it may be difficult to understand that their language does not endorse the power of difference at the expense of excluding “others.” Their sharing of traumatic personal experiences, the admonishment of their exclusionary counterparts, and the cataloguing of the multiple oppressions they face because of their multiple identity-positions risks being perceived as naïve or worse, as attempts to make themselves out as disempowered victims. Resist the urge to cite a success such as Dr. Condoleezza Rice, an unpartnered African American woman who has the “privilege” of being secretary of state, as evidence that such concerns are overblown and passé. Realize instead that the political, social, and discursive environment following the civil rights and women’s rights movements led to the creation of the discourse of the politics of identity. It was revolutionary for a woman of difference to divulge her personal experiences, look at her own position, and campaign for herself about her personal place. Her individual identity and multiple identifications were platforms and pathways toward her political and social autonomy.53 Whether through discussion or announcement, she declared that she mattered and that she would wage war for and from her unique location—an action that is distinct from the claims of exclusionism and separatism that have been lodged against such statements. The strategy of staging a dialogue—whether presented as a conversation between like-situated interlocutors, a proclamation to adversaries, or an argument with rivals—was not lost on artists. They, too, would employ the strategy, for it was an effective way both to stage the making and maintenance of identity and to assert the agency to do so. The strategy is in keeping with the politics of identity: it shifts the terms for intersectional identities, making them productive rather than destructive. Antin’s use of that exchange tactic to stake a claim at particular identiEleanor Antin

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fications and perform specific identities is evident in a letter to the editor published in Chrysalis magazine in the spring of 1980, just months after Antinova’s appearance in the performance Before the Revolution. In it, she announces the goal of her art: it will “consider the equivocal nature of the self and the ‘the other’ by playing a number of roles, each of which has a legitimate claim on my soul.”54 Her mission statement comes as a response to a letter-to-the-editor from novelist and writer Michelle Cliff, who reproaches the artist’s figurative ventriloquism and literal blackening-up as the Black Movie Star. True to her word “equivocal,” Antin seems to speak several voices equally and simultaneously, expressing the points of view of herself-the-artist, herself-the-ethnic-artist, herself-the-woman, the persona the Black Movie Star, and the persona Eleanora Antinova. Antin stakes a claim to inhabit and speak from these various identifications. For instance, Antin merged herself-the-artist with the Black Movie Star and announced her power to switch identities, proclaiming “it is the nature of movie stars to play roles, to act” (7). In an act of self-assertion coupled with provocation, she announces, “I have begun to colour all of my selves black—the Black Ballerina, the Black King, the Black Nurse” (7). As though anticipating a negative response to the idea she espouses—that the word “black” could be separated from its reference to African Americans and refer only to a color (or to the proliferation of color) with which she could shade a character—Antin explains, “my blackness is the existential center of my work, calling up the theatrical structure of reality by placing the role of the actor—she who is ‘other’ than herself—up front” (7). The meaning and function of “blackness” in the context of the artist’s phrase “blackness is the existential center of my work” is difficult to parse, but her linking it to “she who is ‘other’” connotes associations with evil, abjection, absence, and other negative correlations. Antin’s use of the first-person possessive to refer to blackness suggests an empathy and identification with the marginal and abject status that is associated with blackness and people who are identified as black. However, it also underscores an entitled and privileged position that is associated with whiteness: blackness belongs to Antin because she is white and privileged. In explicating her understanding of “otherness,” that is, of “she who is ‘other’ than herself,” Antin attempts to draw equivalences between different types of “others.” “Blacks are ‘the other’, just as women are ‘the other’, as, for that matter, artists are ‘the other’. Black people, like women people are invisible, embarrassing, disturbing, dangerous” (7). Assuming the au-

thority of an invisible male author, Antin provides her reader with a purportedly objective history of how blacks and women have been regarded by the white patriarchy. Just as quickly, the artist slips back into the position of the dispossessed, speaking about how “we” are perceived: Liberals may see us as noble, natural, innocent, sensitive, even tal­ ented—a sort of updated “they sing and dance well.” But we blacks do not experience ourselves as “other,” as we women do not experience ourselves as “the other,” as we artists do not experience ourselves as “the other.” (7) This passage reads as a sophisticated discussion of the relationship of the margins to the center: how one’s position dictates one’s perception of what is marginal versus what is central. Antin questions who is “other” to whom? The privileged and central position against which all are declared “other” does not belong only to white men, she seems to say. Rather, the position changes according to the subject position of the person occupying the central space of self, not according to the position of the “other.” “There is a continuous struggle between the world and the self over the nature of reality,” Antin writes, because when blacks, women, and artists occupy the center position, they are not “‘other’ to themselves” (7). In this, Antin problematizes the notion of “otherness” even while identifying herself as “other” and with “otherness.” The artist indicts white male patriarchy and distances herself from (white) liberal humanism, criticizing it for its condescending and patronizing attitude. Antin goes so far as to label Cliff a “true white liberal,” despite the fact that she is a Jamaicaborn Creole, and takes her to task for her preference “to lecture not listen” (7). Antin aligns herself with non-majority-culture feminists, like Moraga, Anzaldúa, Lorde, and Smith, who were articulating their difference as political platforms and lodging complaints against the unquestioned power and entitlement their white counterparts possessed by virtue of their racial background. The artist adopts the position of different feminists in order to argue against middle-class white feminists who seemed happy to speak for rather than with their marginalized peers. Toward that end, Antin takes an ironic tone that echoes the patronizing, colonialist narrative that she imagines a white liberal feminist might possess about “minorities”: “Blacks, Indians, Chicanos, etc. . . . always suffer and die young and violently because they do not live in suburban settings and wear warm clothes and go to college” (7). Not only does that passage demonstrate the Eleanor Antin

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artist’s mocking, but nonetheless serious, collapsing of the narratives and logic that surround the intersection of racial, class, and educational hierarchies, but it also shows how she distances herself from “true white liberals” by mimicking colonialist tropes of practiced (read patronizing) concern. Antin’s rhetorical performance of blackness suggests her allegiance to matters significant to minoritarian feminists as well as her identification with “otherness.” One might say, following Garber’s insights on crossdressing, that, through this rhetorical blacking up, the artist puts category itself in crisis.55 Yet, the tone of exasperation that the artist affects and the exaggeration of her tirade suggest she is enacting an overblown version of “otherness” or racial paranoia that mandates, according to the inflated rules of stereotypy, that any insult is escalated to the level of injurious attack. As a result, Antin’s over-the-top rendering does double duty: it mocks minorities at the same time that it castigates white feminists. The frustration the artist enacts echoes that expressed by individuals who interpret minorities’ voicing their concerns as their wallowing in victimhood. Her performance is so open that she is able to embody both the protests of minoritarian groups and the eye-rolling response of majoritarian groups. Indeed, this performance as herself and “other” demonstrates Antin’s affiliation with the authoritative position of the white feminists she critiques, even as it suggests that she, too, felt entitled to speak on behalf of those less privileged than herself. Clearly, Antin manipulated signs of identification in ways that were not consistently critical. Around the time Antin’s letter to the Chrysalis editor was published, a few months after Antin introduced Antinova in the show Before the Revolution and just a few months before Antin’s three-week performance as Eleanora Antinova, the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States was mounted. Set up at A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery in New York City in 1980, the exhibit was curated by artists Kazuko Miyamoto and Ana Mendieta and featured the work of several women of color.56 Many of the works in the exhibition grappled with how to examine concepts of identity and incorporate poststructuralist discourse into artistic practice. Howardena Pindell’s contribution to the exhibit was the videoinstallation Free, White and 21 (1980) (figure 14), a work she was motivated to make, she recalls, because she had “yet another run-in with racism in the art world and the white feminists.”57 Her desire was to protest “the erasure of experience, canceling and rewriting of history” that white feminists



14 Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21, 1980, courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen, New York

enact against women of color in order to make themselves “feel safe and unthreatened.”58 In keeping with the conversational strategy used so skillfully by the likes of Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, the African American artist, who is based in New York, confronted head-on the issue of identity by staging a dialogue between herself and White Woman, a character designed to embody the privilege and authority white feminists were critiqued for possessing. The persona White Woman is played by Pindell who affected the character change by applying white pancake makeup to her light-brown skin and bright pink lipstick to her lips, dressing in an outmoded blonde wig, and wearing old-fashioned, cat-eye sunglasses. In Free, White and 21, Pindell employs the film technique of cut/crosscut to portray a face-to-face conversation between White Woman and herself. Most of the video, however, features a close-up of the artist who alternates between looking directly into the camera and obscuring her face by wrapping her entire head with gauze. The artist details, in a measured and calm voice, for White Woman (and the viewer), the myriad ways she experiences discrimination, including, but not limited to, being tied to her cot by a white teacher during elementary-school naptime, facing exclusion from an advanced math course because a white teacher conjectured that a less-bright white student would benefit more from the material, receiving rejection letters to her five hundred letters of application to professorial positions, and being gawked at during a wedding luncheon. Eleanor Antin

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In the beginning, White Woman expresses her disbelief of, and distance from, her interlocutor’s experiences by responding with the statements, “You know you really must be paranoid. Those things never happen to me. I don’t know anyone who’s had those things happen to them.”59 While Pindell continues to list damaging episodes from her life in a distant and impersonal tone, White Woman’s responses become increasingly callous and ruthless. White Woman attacks the artist, her work, and her very being: You ungrateful little . . . after all we have done for you. You really must be paranoid. I have never had experiences like that. Your art really isn’t political either. I hear your experiences, and I think, “It’s got to be in her art.” It’s got to be in your art. And, it’s got to be in your art in a way that we consider valid. If your symbols aren’t used in a way that we acknowledge, then we won’t validate them. In fact, you don’t exist until we validate you. If you don’t want to do what we tell you to do, then we’ll find other tokens.60 The video concludes with White Woman dismissing Pindell’s experiences with the statement: “Of course, I am free, white and twenty-one.”61 In other words, because she is “free, white and twenty-one,” White Woman is forever immune to the discrimination endured by women like Pindell, whose multiple identifications stack up against them and often lead to multiple oppressions. In the context of the video, White Woman’s final statement encapsulates the entitlement white feminists are accorded due to race privilege, the very entitlement that Pindell is speaking about in Free, White and 21. Several factors coalesce to make Pindell’s Free, White and 21 particularly effective in engaging the discourse of the politics of identity and challenging the inequities minoritarian feminists experienced in majoritarian feminist organizations. For instance, because Free, White and 21 is an art video that was displayed in the context of a group exhibition and in the space of the gallery, it was one of many works that contributed to the feeling of dense and sustained confrontation. Likewise, with Pindell’s crossracial performance transpiring in a little over twelve minutes, the drama of interracial conflict is thick and strong but compact. Its punches are delivered politely but powerfully. In addition, because Pindell uses the cut/ cross-cut filmic convention, her simulated conversation visualizes the fact that she plays both parts, herself and White Woman.62 In that way, Pindell highlights white fears of black infiltration and the contagion of white com-

munities at the same time that it undermines the idea that whiteness is inaccessible to, and impermeable by, blacks. The relationship of Free, White and 21 to its audience is also significant, for the video was displayed in the A.I.R. Gallery, an exhibition space that continues to be maintained by a group of feminist artists who are largely white, as part of a show of work by “third world women artists of the United States.” Pindell anticipated that the majority of her audience would likely be the very white feminists she critiques in the video. As a result, the work has a decidedly didactic tone: at the same time the artist confronts her colleagues with their entitled and privileged behavior, she rehearses a conversational exchange for them from which they might learn to modify their behavior. Antin’s various performances of Eleanora Antinova took place in contexts wherein the audiences’ relationship to the artist and the work was quite different from that of Free, White and 21. In the case of Before the Revolution (staged at the Kitchen) and Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (staged at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery), Antin performed before a group of people who were largely like, rather than unlike, her, and in the case of the life-performance that lasted twenty days, she performed among an audience that did not know it was experiencing performance, or, perhaps more accurately, with audience members who did not know they were taking part in a performance. Whereas the strategic conversation that Pindell models in Free, White and 21, like those of authors Lorde, Anzaldúa, Moraga, and Smith among others, is a community-making tactic that includes a particular population and excludes another, Antin’s mode of address in the Eleanora Antinova performances is ambivalent. She neither bonds with like-minded individuals about similar experiences nor does she confront adversaries with their intellectual or ideological shortcomings. Instead, Antin ingratiates herself with viewers and makes the audience duplicitous with her performance. The question is whether this is a critical strategy.

“White Negro”: Eleanora Antinova and Blackface Performance To change Antin into Eleanora Antinova required physical, behavioral, and psychological transformation.63 Getting fake nails was the first step of the physical transformation. Antin spent four hours at a salon “having long Eleanor Antin

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porcelain nails attached to [her] stubby fingers” and creating “the illusion of glamour” because she believed “long nails add to [a ballerina’s] graceful line both on and off stage.”64 Next, Antin applied dark makeup to exposed parts of her body, including her face, neck, and hands: I stroked the brown cake make-up into my face with a gentle, rotating motion. . . . I started coloring my throat with the cake makeup, which I had planned to use only on my face, because it covers such a relatively small area at a time. . . . Then I had to wash off my throat and start over again with the brown liquid color. It did cover more ground but came off in streaks on my skin. It had to be blended, but it’s a nice color. (6) Thinking of her newly dark face as a blank canvas, she painted green and silver shadow onto her eyes and likened it to “drawing with a soft chalk” (6). In other words, Antin painted the portrait of Antinova onto her own face. Antin completed the Antinova look by wearing long, flowing, and body-conscious clothing made of rich materials. During the day, she wore a “wrap-around dance sweater” which “snuggled tightly” her “full bosom” (16) or a green velvet jacket and a purple fedora. On special occasions, she wore a dress from the 1930s that she described as a beautiful black silk covered in “jet and silver beads [that] emit a rich and somber glow over the bodice and flowing sleeves” (5). She traded in the sensible shoes she customarily wore for high heels or ballet slippers. The artist notes that “it . . . takes a little under two hours to darken and glamorize myself,” which is “in line with the time traditionally taken by glamorous women to represent themselves to the world” (5). Despite the lengthy preparation of her appearance, Antin fretted over her disguise, wondering if she was passing for black successfully or if her masquerade would be found out. Before she even embarked on the performance, the artist dreamt that one of her colleagues, the art critic Lucy Lippard, called her out: “You are a fake. If you washed the paint off your face you’d be white” (3). Beginning in this dream state and continuing throughout the nearly three weeks of the performance, Antin reminded herself “a black woman ballerina, I am,” “a small lady with light eyes, long fingernails, a big bosom, and a dark face” (8). Yet she wondered “if there is still something strange about me” and worried that her darkness created “uncertainty” (8). She questioned whether she sent “out strange signals” (8). “Maybe they conflict. Or maybe I fail to send out some signals people with

dark skins regularly transmit. Maybe people can’t read me or maybe they can only read me partially” (8). Antin’s expression of self-doubt does not appear to be a moral or ethical quandary about the availability of blackness and the black mask for performative, and perhaps exploitative, uses. What Antin questions is her mastery of the (cultural) semiotics of blackness. Here we glimpse some of the genius of the Antinova project: Antin points to the fact that blackness is a sign separate from, and sometimes but not always related to, African Americans and African American culture. Antin’s language also identifies the disconnect between signifier and signified, while acknowledging the important position of the interpreter of the signs. Even while Antin acknowledges the critical role the interpreter plays in reading the signs of blackness, the language of her journal entries suggests that she was unsure about who her interpreters would be. It is not clear, for instance, if she supposed her interpreters would be African Americans or Euro-Americans, but she seems not to have been concerned about alienating them. Rather, her language indicates ambivalence about whether she needs or wants to employ the signs of blackness correctly. Antin is one of several Jewish performers—including Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and Mezz Mezzrow, to name a few—who participated in the blackface tradition which author Michael Rogin defines as “a form of crossdressing, in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class, or race that stands in binary opposition to one’s own.”65 Antin and other Jewish performers used the signs of blackness in the service of personal transformation and identity making. Not only did they activate signs of blackness, they also embodied blackness in their figurative and literal blackface performances. More than a way to gain commercial notoriety, enacting blackness by darking up provided these artists a way to navigate away from or toward Jewish identity. In contrast to Eric Lott, whose book Love and Theft studies the nineteenth-century minstrel shows of working-class Irish American men and middle-class Anglo men, Rogin focuses on early twentieth-century instances of Jewish men blackening up and argues that their goal was to achieve unmarked ethnicity or whiteness. He claims that blackface transformed Old World to New World and “turned” German and Eastern European Jewish “immigrants,” who fled the racial stain of anti-Semitism, into “Americans.”66 Rogin argues that Jews became an ethnic rather than a racial group once in the United States, where “history, not biology disEleanor Antin

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tinguishes ethnicity from race, making the former groups distinctive but assimilable, walling off the latter, legally, socially, and ideologically, to benefit those within the magic circle and protect the national body from contamination.”67 According to his definition, Jews were assimilable precisely because they were not the black racial “other,” the feared racial contaminant.68 Rogin’s chapter on the film The Jazz Singer (1927), starring the Jewish vaudevillian actor Al Jolson, is particularly compelling in relation to the Antinova project in that the author asserts that blackface allowed the fictional Jakie Rabinowitz and the real Al Jolson to travel down the road from ethnic Jewishness to the privileges and supposed neutrality of whiteness. Rogin argues that, by masquerading as black and putting on “the mask of a group that must remain immobile, inassimilable, and fixed at the bottom”—a group that is perpetually perceived as a racial contaminant— the fictional Rabinowitz and the real Jolson emphasized their whiteness and were thus carried from “jazz singer . . . to American acceptance.”69 Antin’s Eleanora Antinova relates to Jolson’s performances in The Jazz Singer because both artists inhabited the stereotypical figure of the black to affect transformation. Their purposes for trying on the signs of blackness were different, however. In Rogin’s estimation, Jolson put on a black mask in order to extract signs of race and ethnicity from his identity: his ultimate goal was to become white. Antin does not appear to have shared the goal of erasing her ethnic markings, divesting from Jewishness, and adopting whiteness. Rather, she seems engaged in the politics of identity, insisting on her own difference from white by putting on the dark mask. Antin’s use of the black mask is perhaps more like that of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow who, arguably, each located their own ethnicity through blackness. Sophie Tucker’s chapter “Blackface” in her autobiography Some of These Days (1945) provides a useful account of this process. She recounts that she began her singing career appearing as herself, but in making the switch to vaudeville, the singer was advised to blacken up because, she recalls a stage manager saying, she was “so big and ugly” that the crowd would “razz her” otherwise.70 Tucker appeared on stage moments after an assistant “got some ordinary corks from liquor bottles, lit a match, burned the corks . . . smeared [her] face, ears, and neck, tied a red bandanna over [her] hair, [and] painted . . . a grotesque grinning mouth” on her face with red lipstick, and the audience loved her.71 She remembers trying to convince her agent to let her “leave off

the black,” to try her out the way she is to see if she would go over, but he wouldn’t have it.72 Her act was so successful that she quickly garnered the moniker “World-renowned Coon Shouter,” singing “‘coon melodies’” and appearing in traditional burnt-cork blackface as well as in, what she calls, “high yellow” blackface.73 Her “greatest difficulty,” she recollects, “was convincing the audience [she] was a white girl [because] her Southern accent had got to be . . . thick and smooth as molasses.”74 She remedied, or perhaps compounded, the confusion by “interpolating Jewish words” in some of her songs and peeling off a glove and waving to the crowd to show she was a white girl.75 After a few years, Tucker was able to shift away from blackface and perform as herself or as white characters in more traditional productions and venues. That transition was facilitated by blackface, for it was under the cover of blackness that the singer was able both to prove her ability and mask her size, homeliness, and ethnicity. Tucker’s admission that she “couldn’t bear to have [her family] know [she] went on in blackface” is provocative. It suggests discomfit, and possibly shame, on the entertainer’s part, which does not necessarily jibe with the success that resulted from her blackening up.76 Did her feeling derive from an ambivalence she felt about the blackface tradition and its circulation of damaging images, or was the shame an expression of her bruised pride that she was instructed to hide herself? No matter, what is important is Tucker became a fixture in popular entertainment who would openly claim her ethnicity and eventually contribute to Israeli and Jewish-American philanthropies.77 In other words, she realized her professional success and practiced her ethnic affiliation through blackness and blackface. In his autobiography Really the Blues (1946), Mezz Mezzrow describes the lengths he went to mark himself as “other” and outside. Mezzrow’s blackface performance was metaphoric, though, like Jolson’s and Tucker’s literal blackface, it was also based in the idea of “authentic” blackness. The musician described his transformation from square to hip jazzman as a circuitous journey that included befriending petty criminals, alienating himself from his family, hanging out in underworld establishments, and spending time in prison. After joining the prison’s band, he came to realize that “the colored man, like as not, can toss [the blues] off with a laugh and a mournful, but not too mournful, song.”78 Disregarding the perception that blacks are “shiftless and happy-go-lucky” people who “just [don’t] give a damn,” he writes that “the real story” is that “the colored man Eleanor Antin

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doesn’t often get sullen and tight-lipped and evil because his philosophy goes deeper and he thinks straight.”79 Mezzrow says he left prison “chocolate brown” after learning that “Negroes . . . were [his] kind of people.”80 “I was going to be a musician, a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.”81 These passages demonstrate that Mezz­ row replaced one set of stereotypes about blackness with another and that he picked up and tried on what he perceived as the positive attributes of “authentic” blackness. Mezzrow identified not only with the music and culture of African Americans but also with the marginalized status they were accorded because, as “a Chicago-born Jew from Russian parents,” he had experienced his fair share of prejudice at the hands of white southerners.82 When he traveled with Jewish friends to southern Missouri, he recalls that white people called them “nigger-lovers” and “Negroes.”83 Those experiences made Mezzrow even more resolute about his decision: “Solid. I not only loved those colored boys, but I was one of them—I felt closer to them than I felt to the whites, and I even got the same treatment they got.”84 Sympathizing with the black people with whom he played jazz and blues was not enough for Mezzrow. He found himself emulating the mannerisms of African Americans in order to be a hip musician. Without “putting [his] mind to it,” he developed “a Southern accent,” he recalls. “Every word that rolled off my lips was soft and fuzzy, wrapped in a yawn, creeping with a slowmotion crawl.” One of his friends even accused him of “trying to ape the colored man.” He admits to using “so many of the phrases and intonations of the Negro” that he “must have sounded like [he] was trying to pass for colored.”85 Mezzrow’s immersion was so deep that he denounced Jewishness and Jewish ethnic solidarity, married an African American woman, and had a mixed-race child. Literary historian Maria Damon argues persuasively that Mezzrow’s performance of blackness is remarkable because it reinforces, rather than obliterates, his Jewishness. In other words, blackness allowed the musician to maintain “the special role of critique” that attends being a “social outsider.”86 She counters Rogin’s contentions, reasoning instead that figures such as Mezzrow and the comedian Lenny Bruce “found in African American culture the resources for resisting absorption into a dominant culture they found stultifying, hierarchic, unjust, unaesthetic, and un-Jewish.”87 Their “enamorment of African American culture . . . [was] motivated not by the impulse to assimilate but by the impulse to resist.”88

Antin’s retelling of her first public performance as Antinova, published in Being Antinova, shows how the artist makes the politics of identity productive: she, like Mezzrow and Tucker, gets to Jewishness through blackness while luxuriating in being self and other, that is, Antin and Antinova, simultaneously. For this first outing, Antin attended a course on art-world professions at Columbia University with her gallerist Ronald Feldman. The artist describes deciding, en route to the presentation, how she as Antinova would behave. Approaching the presentation as a “full-fledged performance,” she planned to “restrain [her] usual public style” and behave as she imagined Antinova would, “as gracious, perhaps even with some of that sleepy Southern charm” since “most blacks still retain vestiges of southernisms in their voice or speech.”89 Still, Antin worried that her “professional New York accent,” which sounds “like a Jewish taxi driver from the Bronx,” would give away her disguise as a black ballerina (9). Antin decided to mount an impression of Stokely Carmichael while giving her presentation. She says she ranted and battled against her “devils—formalists, minimalists, systematists, conceptualists, sexists, racists, government bureaucrats, pollsters, oil companies, corporate sponsors, nuclear power, television, ballet and opera companies, symphony orchestras, painters, collectors, museum trustees, certain museums, doctors, Marxists, Freudians, heavy metal sculptors, genius theory, George Balanchine” (9). Antin labels her “Stokely Carmichael number” “a success” and compares it to the manner in which “the low-down black hipsters must have” inspired “the liberal lawyers and politicians of the civil rights movement,” a group of “polite young professionals,” whom she supposed had “all the personal style of a loaf of white bread” (9). She recalls that “her cranky style” won over even the most suspicious student, a young black man who began the class by “glowering” with a “fierce face” and ended it by “laughing louder than anybody else” (9). Was Antin able to win over the suspicious student because of her “cranky style,” or was it her “New York accent,” which she supposed “gave the students the illusion of energy” (9)? Perhaps more importantly, can her “cranky style” and political ranting be separated into the categories of African American and Jewish American, especially considering that Stokely Carmichael, the black nationalist that Antin aped, is an African American who was born in Trinidad and grew up in a Jewish area of the Bronx?90 Maria Damon’s essay provides a useful way to think through those questions, for she is deeply interested in language and the ways that Jewish and Eleanor Antin

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African Americans use it. Noting that “all standard caveats and stereotypy apply,” Damon explains that “the African American and Jewish traditions share a love of verbal display and value language performance far beyond its strictly utilitarian, signifier-equals-signified status as a ‘tool’ for communication.”91 Jews and blacks, she continues, share “a personal relationship with a narrative or textual authority, a relationship that more than permits challenge and interaction,” as well as “an excitement over the possibilities of verbal invention and a recognition of the protean, nonstatic richness of language.”92 So when Antin admits that she “couldn’t get into her character, or more precisely, [she] couldn’t throw off [her] own,” she seems to suppose an ethnocultural distinction that is, in fact, more of a similarity. In other words, Antin gets to her Jewishness through Stokely Carmichael and blackness.93 Significantly, in that first public performance of Antinova, Antin accessed and enacted stereotypes of both blackness and Jewishness. She linked black people to a “sleepy Southern charm” and to the militant nationalism that characterized Stokely Carmichael’s rhetoric from the late 1960s and early 1970s. She also casts African Americans as people who are hypersensitive to racial discrimination and quick to attribute racist motivations to any and every affront regardless of magnitude. Antin connects Jewishness to New York, aligning both with crankiness, energy, and taxi drivers from the Bronx. Disregarding whether the stereotypes are equally egregious, what is crucial is that Antin attributed difference and “otherness” to both Jews and blacks, defining the two in opposition to “white bread” liberals. Antin’s description of her first public performance of Antinova suggests that she understood identity, including blackness, Jewishness, and femininity, to be a set of stereotypical signs and narratives that were open to manipulation. Though Antin’s performance as Antinova is perhaps closer to Tucker’s and Mezzrow’s use of the black mask than to Jolson’s, she did, in fact, color her skin black and drape herself in a glorified and sensationalized stereotype of blackness. Even Damon is quick to point out that using blackness and African American culture to resist assimilation—and, I would add, garner professional success—is “not unproblematic.”94 In the end, Antin’s performance functioned “as a vehicle for . . . ethnic mobility,” as it did for Jolson, Tucker, and Mezzrow.95 Likewise, Antin’s and the other artists’ performances of blackness suggest erotic fixation and fascination with black

bodies at the same time that they indicate the power differentials within difference.96 That Antin, Jolson, Tucker, Mezzrow and others manipulate the signs of blackness highlights the intractability of blackface, the persistence of stereotypes of blackness, and the unrelentingly debased position of black people in American culture and society. It is part of a proverbial vicious circle: the devalued position of black people in American history and society continues to render blackness available for the taking and black people and culture open to exaggerated representations. What is it about blackness that leaves it open for use? For starters, American blackness has the distinction of being both vacant and occupied, available for use precisely because it seems so thoroughly understood and known. Similarly, blackness, like its supposed opposite whiteness, is imbued with a set of foundational narratives and essential characteristics that, despite its elasticity, lends the category a sense of history, stability, wholeness, and authenticity—even while the outlines of authenticity have shifted from nostalgic notions of Southern plantation culture in the late nineteenth century, to Southern, rural, poor, folk culture in the first decades of the twentieth century, and then to urban blight and poverty in the middle and final decades of that century.97 Despite its shifting lines, blackness continues to be associated with the emotions, the body, urban culture, the primitive, overt sexuality, poverty, and heterosexist masculinity, and it remains a highly traded commodity.98 Notwithstanding Antin’s enunciation of a Jewish identity as an articulation of the politics of identity, the Antinova performance—as one instance of the ever-multiplying uses of blackness—reveals the limits of autonomous heterogeneity and intimates the tenacity of hierarchy within difference.

Gender Performance, “Colored” Eleanora Antinova has rendered most critics and historians decidedly silent.99 One suspects that the project’s dependence on Antin’s applying dark makeup to her skin to masquerade as black made it taboo to scholars working in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the height of so-called “identity politics art.” At the turn of this century however, just when Eleanora Antinova seemed ready to be abandoned by art history, the art world switched artistic discourses from one in which identity mattered to one,

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defined by Thelma Golden as “post-black,” in which identity (supposedly) does not matter and so-called “political correctness” has gone out the ­window.100 In our current postethnic environment, Antin’s blackface performance was rehabilitated by Lisa Bloom in the catalogue that accompanied Antin’s retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999, just as Cindy Sherman’s was revealed in the exhibition and catalogue Early Work of Cindy Sherman (2000 and 2001).101 Bloom argues persuasively that Antin’s Jewish ethnicity is a major factor in her art that has been largely ignored by scholars and peers and that critics fail to realize that the artist was working from the specific subject position of a second-generation immigrant woman of Eastern European Jewish descent. Take, as an example, Bloom’s approach to Antin’s work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972). Made up of 148 photographs arranged in a horizontal grid that stretches across a wall, Carving documents a month-long diet that resulted in Antin’s losing weight and changing her shape. Traditionally read as a critique of the unreasonably high standards of beauty that classical sculpture and patriarchal society present for women generally, Bloom interprets Carving as “a willful failure to assimilate as a generic subject,” as the artist seems to be showing that her ethnic female body is outside the standard of femininity and beauty established by the white patriarchal order.102 In Bloom’s interpretation, Antin casts herself as an outsider in order to establish her ethnic difference. Critical paths diverge, however, when Bloom claims that in the Antinova works Antin took up the black mask in order to emphasize the historical discrimination shared by Jews and blacks. That assessment, it seems to me, obscures the problematics surrounding Antin’s use of blackness and blackface. While many of Antin’s works can, and indeed should, be understood as the artist’s exploring the deeply intertwined categories of whiteness and femininity, it is unclear in the Antinova performances whether Antin distanced herself and Jewishness from the privileges of whiteness by coloring herself black, or whether, by painting her skin dark, she inadvertently aligned herself and Jewishness with whiteness in a troubling, albeit ironic, way. The racial category of whiteness, in contrast to blackness, presents itself as ordinary, normal, and decidedly unraced. Film historian Richard Dyer explains, in his influential article and book White (1988 and 1997), that

whiteness works in myriad ways to normalize white entitlement and black disempowerment. He goes on to say that whiteness is a subject that “seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin,” yet it has been “colonized” as the normative (and powerful) position and “the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human.”103 “White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular. It is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial.”104 One way whiteness works is to endow certain figures with attributes that characterize them as pure, talented, and ephemeral or powerful, ethical, and neutral.105 Like blackness, whiteness is an ideologically and culturally constructed trope that is endowed with real world consequences: those who wear the cloak of whiteness hope to assume the mantle of entitlement and power. Antin’s The King of Solano Beach, a project performed in 1973 during the height of so-called essentialist feminist art, has traditionally been analyzed in terms of gender and persona-play, but it deserves examination in relation to the problem of whiteness and race privilege. The character is based loosely on the historical personage of Eng­land’s Charles I. To become the King, Antin wore a mustache and beard as well as a costume that consisted of a hat, jeans, ruffled shirt, tall leather boots, and cape. Antinas-the-King acted in the noble, provident, masculine, and entitled way she imagined a king would, interacting in chivalrous ways with some citizens while assuming familiarity with others.106 The gender and class positions of the fictional King might obscure his race positionality, but when comparing the figure to another fictional persona created the following year, his raced position comes back into focus. For Piper’s Mythic Being persona, she donned an Afro wig, a dark mustache, and clothes that she thought registered as “working class.” Though the artist referred to the persona as “third world” and did not label him “black” until 1991, the signs she employed marked her character as raced, as “embodying everything you most hate and fear.” The concatenation of identifications, or the intersectionality of identity, as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw calls it, of these fictional personae is deeply significant: one might argue that Piper became a more potent avatar of blackness as the Mythic Being just as the King became a more powerful example of whiteness because of the ways race intersects with gender, class, and education level in the personae.107 That Antin’s King is not as meticulous or haughty as his precedent

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Charles I, whom Anthony Van Dyke portrays as the image of arrogance and entitlement, is significant. His unkempt and messy appearance implies that he does not possess the wealth and largesse that kings are thought to hold, just as his interactions with his subjects, including drinking canned beer with commoners on park benches, do not convey the sense of veneration that royalty is generally accorded. The artist’s King is decidedly gender ambiguous: he wears facial hair and men’s clothes, but he also has breasts that are rather apparent. His gender and privilege are questionable, just as his whiteness is sullied. Antin continued her exploration of the “corrupt genre” of gender archetype in her next persona, created the same year.108 If her King is emblematic of an ambivalence toward white male privilege and entitlement, then the Ballerina, also mounted during feminist art’s supposed biologicaldeterminist phase, might be said to represent a different point on the same continuum: dressed in white leotard, tutu, tights, and shoes, and with her hair pulled into a tight bun at the crown of her head, Antin-asthe-Ballerina is the representation of ideal feminine glamour. Antin explains that she chose the figure of the ballerina because she was “the [most] glamorous female image [she] could think of.”109 Playing the role of ballerina allowed her to feel like her “most wonderful, grand, beautiful, female self.”110 The artist did not link the stereotype of ultrafemininity represented by the image of the ballerina to race and whiteness when she launched the performances in 1973; however, by 1979, when she launched the Eleanora Antinova persona, she labeled ballet “a white machine.”111 Dyer likewise connects the figure of the ballerina to representations of whiteness. If, as Dyer argues, white women “are constructed as the apotheosis of desirability, all that a man could want, yet nothing that can be had, nor anything that a woman can be,”112 then the ballerina icon is particularly persistent because, in her figure, whiteness weds unattainable glamour and femininity: The white woman as angel was . . . both the symbol of white virtuousness and the last word in the claim that what made white special as a race was their non-physical, spiritual, indeed ethereal qualities. It held up an image of what white women should be, could be, essentially were, an image that had attractions for actual white people. . . . The . . . image is caught in the figure of the ballerina [who, with] . . . the soft, flaring gaslight . . . diffused by the fluffed up, multiple layers of the tutu, . . . [was] constructed [as] a translucent, incorporeal image.113



1 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, 1975, black and white photograph, overdrawn with oil crayon, 8 x 10 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin, and collection of Thomas Erben, New York.



2 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971, number one of fourteen silver gelatin prints, 141/2 x 15 in. each, © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin, and collection of Thomas Erben, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal.



3a Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter #1, 1975, one of three black and white photographs overdrawn with oil crayon, 10 x 8 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin, and collection of Spencer Art Museum, Lawrence, Kansas.



3b Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter #2, 1975, one of three black and white photographs overdrawn with oil crayon, 10 x 8 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin, and collection of Spencer Art Museum, Lawrence, Kansas.



3c Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter #3, 1975, one of three black and white photographs overdrawn with oil crayon, 10 x 8 in., © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin, and collection of Spencer Art Museum, Lawrence, Kansas.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



4 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova as Pocahontas, from “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev 1919–1929” (1977–78), courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.



5 Leon Bakst, Sketch for costume for Shéhérazade, Ballets Russes, 1910, from Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



6 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova in L’Esclave, from “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 1919–1929” (1977–78), courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



7 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova in The Hebrews, from “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 1919–1929” (1977–78), courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]



8 Eleanor Antin, Eleanora Antinova in Prisoner of Persia, from “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 1919–1929” (1977–78), courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

9–11 Anna Deavere Smith as “Maria, Juror #7,” “Cornel West,” “Mrs. June Park,” from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000).



12 Nikki S. Lee, The Tourist Project, 13, 1997, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



13 Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, NY (Statue of Liberty), 1979, from the Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series 1979–89, © 1979 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York.



14 Nikki S. Lee, The Swingers Project, 53, 1998–99, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



15 Nikki S. Lee, The Yuppie Project, 5, 2001, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



16 Nikki S. Lee, The Hip Hop Project, 1, 2001, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

For Dyer, the image of the ballerina represents the white feminine ideals of virtue and unearthliness. In the videotape Caught in the Act (1973), which documents the making of the photographic series Choreography (1973), Antin pulls back the curtain on the Ballerina and perhaps on whiteness in a pointed and humorous way. The Ballerina, shown balancing herself with the aid of a stick, is revealed to be a hack who cannot dance.114 Likewise, in the video, The Ballerina and the Bum (1974), the Ballerina’s seedy background is disclosed, for she enjoys rolling in the hay with the Bum. Here, Antin alludes to the reputation of promiscuity that attended ballerinas and other entertainers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Antin’s Ballerina tarnishes the otherwise luminous symbol; the figure of unearthliness and unattainable grace is literally grounded. Antin continued to explore gender in her persona the Nurse which, like the King and the Ballerina, also derives from popular gender archetypes. Rather than the attributes of authority and providence granted to kings or the characteristics of ethereality and glamour ascribed to ballerinas, the qualities of caring and compassion are often associated with nurses. The nurse is popularly perceived as a caregiver who nurtures patients and submits to the instructions of doctors (who are assumed to be men). Antin’s works that feature the Nurse both reinforce and parody that model. In the video The Adventures of a Nurse (1976), Antin chronicles the events surrounding (paper doll) Little Nurse Eleanor, a happy-go-lucky character who cares for her male patients and colleagues by coupling with them, while in the video The Nurse and Hijackers (1977), the character remains an earnest airhead who attends to the needs of travelers aboard a hijacked airplane.115 The King, Ballerina, and Nurse projects all demonstrate Antin’s interest in deconstructing stereotypical signs and narratives that are associated with gender even as they indulge her fondness for assuming new identities. The idea to “color” her characters appeared to Antin sometime in the early 1970s, and first came to fruition in 1974, when the extremely shortlived persona the Black Movie Star surfaced.116 A published photograph of the persona reveals that Antin darkened her skin and wore a curly Afro to effect her transformation.117 The idea resurfaced with Eleanora Antinova in 1979. Like the Ballerina, Eleanora Antinova was supposed to be a model of glamorous femininity whose ambition outstrips her ability. Antin “colored” the Ballerina by combining her with the Black Movie Star, Eleanor Antin

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and Eleanora Antinova was the result. Antinova marks a shift to a more postmodern-oriented approach, for the artist capitalizes on the interference between signifieds and their signs by stacking conventional stereotypes onto well-trod narratives. If Eleanora Antinova has some basis in this earlier persona, then both she and the Black Movie Star are, in turn, based on the image of black womanhood sensationalized in films and media at the time. The myth of the black woman as “superwoman” was prevalent in the 1970s, evidenced in the title of Michele Wallace’s 1977 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.118 Wallace argues that black women, such as Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, were depicted by the media as “a crushing burden on the Negro male.”119 The black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver claimed that the myth of the black woman is the “other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak-bodied, delicate freak, a sexpot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong, self-reliant Amazon and deposited her into his kitchen.”120 Film historian Donald Bogle writes that the actors Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier played “macho goddesses,” “beautiful, alluring, glamorous” and “ready for sex and mayhem,” in blaxploitation films such as Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974).121 Antin found the figure of the black woman to be “a contemporary image of glamour,” latching on to the elements of sensuousness, overt sexuality, and empowerment.122 Looking at the line drawings of ballerinas that Antin published in Being Antinova, we see that Antin exploits the stereotype of the woman while toying with the binaries black/white, disorder/order, and savage/civilized. In one drawing (figure 15), seven ballerinas extend their legs in battement à la seconde, but one is out of sync, lifting her right leg instead of her left. That ballerina is the black sheep whose figure has been colored in. Drawn in silhouette, her body reads as black in contradistinction to the other figures whose bodies are constituted by lines that make the blank space read as white skin. Without a caption or title, readers and viewers know that the one who dances out of step and whose costume clashes with her skin is Antinova, the black woman ballerina of Antin’s imagination. In another drawing (figure 16), Antin alludes to the excessive sexuality and sensuality that is a staple of the stereotype of the black woman. Out of a group of seven ballerinas, the dark figure of Antinova stands upright with arms in fourth position while the other ballerinas’ arms are in port de



15 Eleanor Antin, “The Turning Point,” from the Black Ballerina series, pen and ink on paper, 1975, collection of the artist

bras forward. She appears as a stiff banana whose peeling, the white ballerinas, has been pulled back. The black ballerina is a phallus. No doubt, Antin is referring to Josephine Baker, African America’s most famous expatriate dancer whose well-known cabaret act included the notorious Banana Dance. Baker, like the fictional Antinova, was a self-taught dancer who embodied the primitivist exoticism that surrounded blackness, black culture, and black bodies in France in the 1920s. In this drawing, the fictional Antinova, like her real-life counterpart, goes against the grain, standing erect against the rules of gender propriety that white femininity is said to govern. These images borrow freely from ballet manuals that use line drawings to illustrate poses as well as from print cartoons. While ballet manuals seek to suggest the movements of the body and the cartoons attempt to communicate satire or humor, each relies on economy of line. Indeed, the elegance of line in Antin’s drawings is put in taut tension with the images’ content, the bumbling ballerina, which only heightens their wittiness. On the one hand, these drawings can be read as lighthearted and funny: Antinova is a self-taught, free-spirited misfit who does not submit to the strict rules of ballet. Her poses are interesting but incorrect. On the other Eleanor Antin

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16 Eleanor Antin, “The Dying Swan,” from the Black Ballerina series, pen and ink on paper, 1975, collection of the artist

hand, the drawings are deadly serious. Antinova, the dancer with dark skin, is the exotic “other,” confined to roles that emphasize her cultural and racial difference. Though it is difficult to discern whether the line drawings critique or reinforce existing stereotypes about race and gender, it is clear that Antin both imagines a marginalized position for Antinova within the Ballets Russes and draws on well-trod narratives about the underdog outsider who struggles to succeed. Antin establishes Antinova’s place as outside, “other,” and marginalized both textually and visually, on the level of behavior, narrative, and performance. That Antin collapses her own (ethnic) particularity with Antinova’s and that she locates each in a sea of homogeneity is apparent in her recollection of a meal she shared with her friend Carrie, during which the server ignored Antin-as-Antinova’s flirtatious advances.123 Antin writes that the waiter admired Carrie because she looked like a “nice girl from an expensive school,” the “high class” kind who “read books and looked at pictures in museums.”124 According to the artist, Carrie was a “golden girl” who belonged in a “Breck ad”: she had “shoulder-length brown hair” that “gleamed” as though she “brushed it 100 times a night” (12). The author sums up Carrie as a “white and privileged” New Yorker (12). By contrast,

she describes herself-as-Antinova as a “low-class person” who wears “too many clothes,” someone the waiter would perceive as an “unsuitable companion” (12). Antinova is, after all, “the dark one with a foreign name who sleeps with men and comes from the slums” (12). The artist pits Carrie’s airbrushed whiteness against Antinova’s smudged blackness, the artificial blackness of Antin-as-Antinova, and the ethnic marking of Antin. Antin has Carrie and her whiteness come out on top in this duel of attractiveness. In the retelling of the circumstances, it is unclear whether Antin-asAntinova or Antin herself (or a combination of the two) is offended, but whatever the case, Antin determines “that waiter is racist” (13). According to Antin, Carrie does not agree with the artist’s assessment, so she responds by attempting to bring Antin back to reality: Carrie reminds Antin that she is not black and that she is not perceived as black. She looked hard at me. “You do not look black,” she said. “No, I’m white as the driven snow.” I was angry. With such friends, who needs enemies. “You have a lot of makeup on but you’re not black. Nobody would take you for black.” She sounded upset. “Everybody thinks I’m black,” I insisted. “No, they don’t. You’re imagining they do.” “Well, why doesn’t the waiter respond? I’ve been flirting with him for the last ten minutes and his eyes are like ice.” “Maybe you’re not his type.” Carrie sounded distressed. I didn’t understand it. “Why don’t you want me to be black?” I asked curiously. “I don’t care one way or the other.” She sounded like she was going to cry. “You just aren’t.” (13) Was Antin shocked to hear her friend’s evaluation that she was not perceived as black? Was the artist, speaking from the position of an ethnic Jew, offended that Carrie would not acknowledge her difference? Or was Antin staying in the Antinova character and playing the role of affronted black woman? While there is no way of knowing if Carrie really acted in the ways that Antin reported, it is noteworthy that Antin employs the straight man/ funny man comic device wherein two unequal partners are put together for humorous results. In that set-up, the former feeds reason to the latter who responds with eccentricity, and hilarity is supposed to ensue. For instance, Eleanor Antin

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Carrie feeds sensible and rational remarks, such as “You do not look black” and “Maybe you’re not his type,” to Antin/Antinova who comes back with sarcastic retorts and indignant questions: “No, I’m white as the driven snow” and “Why don’t you want me to be black?” Antin deflects attention by projecting onto Carrie sentiments that might more accurately communicate her own emotional state. When, for example, she describes Carrie as “upset” and “distressed” and on the verge of crying, the artist may, in fact, be expressing her own feelings about not being recognized as black. Carrie is made to play the straight man to Antin’s and Antinova’s funny man. If we consider the aspects of ethnic humor that Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson outline in their essay “Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival,” we see that Antin’s humor is couched in decidedly ethnic terms, for this exchange is tinged with the retaliation characteristic of an ethnic minority getting even with an ethnic majority.125 When Antin recalls that Carrie said, “You do not look black . . . You have a lot of makeup on but you’re not black. Nobody would take you for black,” she makes Carrie play white straight man. The artist portrays Carrie as if she is trying to reason with Antin, to persuade her of the folly of her perceptions. And, when Antin responds with the sarcastic, “No, I’m white as the driven snow,” and then, with the more serious, “Everybody thinks I’m black,” she casts Antinova as the black funny man and herself as Jewish funny man. Antin portrays herself and Antinova as outsiders who may be a little mad, but are righteous in their indignation. Here, the artist points to the similarly marginal positions that Jewish and African American people have occupied. For Antin, the dialogue with Carrie becomes an instance of audience participation, an identity-building exercise through which the artist performs her difference and enacts her identification. When Antin/Antinova asks, “Why don’t you want me to be black?,” she evens the racial and ethnic score by projecting xenophobia and intolerance onto her friend, insinuating that Carrie would prefer that the artist remain unmarked, unethnic, and white. Carrie’s response, “I don’t care one way or the other. You just aren’t,” is then presented as whitewashing, as convenient colorblindness meant to smooth over racial and ethnic strife. In Antin’s performance, Carrie is required to serve as the emblem of white femininity against which Antinova and Antin define themselves. Accordingly, Antin classifies Antinova and herself as other than, and different from, the model of white femininity that Carrie is forced to represent. Yet Antin’s performance and relaying of this exchange can be read in

another, more ironic way. The humor and exaggeration of Carrie’s and Antin’s conversation can be understood as the artist parodying the sensitivity or racial paranoia with which majoritarian groups paint minoritarian groups. To say it differently, we might recognize the depiction of the event as an instance of the artist’s lampooning minoritarian groups’ efforts to change the cultural and political landscape by publicly cataloguing and decrying discriminatory behaviors and actions. If the representation of the exchange is interpreted that way, Antin’s duplicity and identification with the white patriarchal majority must also be comprehended. This is a significant instance of critical liminality: the boundary between subject and object disintegrates, Antin and Antinova are collapsed into one. Antin is herself and other at the same time. One discerns an altruistic project designed to promote tolerance. Indeed, Carrie is depicted as a borderline racist who has a problem with Antinova’s blackness, and maybe even with Antin’s Jewishness. Though she is cast as the epitome of white womanhood, Carrie comes off as the antimodel whom Antin/Antinova must confront—in other words, Carrie provides the artist an opportune character against whom she can endorse a positive example of community building and identification making. Yet, the liminality that Antin enacts and displays is not just for public consumption and instruction. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, a demonstration of Antin’s assertiveness and imagination, an exhibition of Antin’s power to write her own story and to claim her own identity as artist and creator, woman, Jewish, and black. It is an assertion of individualism in the face of collectivity.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Orientalism, and Modernism That Antin’s black woman ballerina was (supposed to have been) making a name for herself in the early 1920s, at just about the same time that African American dancer Josephine Baker and Russian Jewish entertainer Ida Rubinstein were winning over France, was not mere coincidence.126 Locating her black ballerina in that period allowed Antin to link her fictitious character to the real Ballets Russes, its Orientalist productions, modernist links, and primitivist history, which included capitalizing on Rubinstein’s ethnicity. The artist played up, to comic and critical effects, the over-the-top, fantastic, and campy qualities of exoticist narratives and productions that were popular in the early twentieth century. In that way, Eleanor Antin

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Antin participated in the critique of Orientalism that Edward Said initiated a few years earlier with the publication of his influential book Orientalism in 1978.127 Said’s manuscript focuses attention on Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East to consider how “the Orient” and the “Oriental” were created by British, French, and American invention, power, and empire.128 Elusive and difficult to define, Orientalism, as Said describes it, is at once an academic discipline based in nineteenth-century ideas, hierarchies, and pseudosciences wherein “the Orient,” its people, and culture are regarded as exotic and inferior; a system of knowledge based on a binary in which the “Occident” is the model and the “Orient” is its antithesis; a discourse produced, consumed, and dominated by the West as a way to define itself and propagate its power; and a series of institutional practices, which in turn lead to material conditions, by which the West subordinates the East. Said is careful to point out that both “the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made” ideas “with no corresponding realities” and that they are not “inert fact[s] of nature.”129 Like the grafter’s shell game, in which the hidden object appears to be shuffled around but does not really exist, Orientalism is a system of mirrors in which the ideas, fantasies, and practices of one commentator are reflected on, referenced by, and elaborated on by another, resulting in the proliferation of the discourse. That the Orient is a representation, “a willed human work” created and controlled by the Occident which annihilates the individual, drives Said’s interest.130 He reveals in the penultimate paragraph of the introduction, that he, as an Arab, is one such individual, someone who, despite the odds, resisted the clutch of Occidental imperialism. In addition to providing a groundbreaking method to ferret out the many ways in which the West attempts to distribute and maintain its epistemological, discursive, and material dominance, Orientalism is an effort of identity building, an articulation of the politics of identity, and a struggle for power within difference rather than power over difference. More than just a way for the artist to exercise her childhood fascination with ballet, Antin’s engagement with the Ballets Russes provided a means to critique the Orientalist paradigm and its efforts to fix many, including herself, as exotic and disenfranchised “others.” Even in its very first tour, in 1909, the company peddled an exoticist vision of the East in The Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor, a series of dances whose mise-enscène was the Russian steppes, and Cléopâtre, a ballet with costumes derived from an earlier production of La Fille du Pharaon and a mise-en-scène



17 Ida Rubinstein as Shéhérazade, Ballets Russes, 1910; from Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

designed after the ancient Egyptian art collections at the State Hermitage Museum.131 No doubt, the exoticism of the Russian company to European and American audiences contributed to its popularity, as did its production of ballets with Eastern themes. Indeed, over the course of its twenty-year existence, the Ballets Russes mounted many Orientalist narrative-fantasies of Near Eastern culture that allowed audiences to indulge in exotic “otherness.”132 The company’s production of Schéhérazade in 1911 is one example. Based in the legend of the virgin who saved her own life and that of other women by telling King Schariar of Samarkand stories so engrossing that he was moved to suspend his raping and killing sprees, the ballet featured costumes and décor inspired by “Persian miniatures.”133 The costume sketch (plate 5) shows a dark-skinned male figure wearing a brightly colored head wrap and voluminous trousers, while a photograph of the production’s star features Ida Rubinstein (figure 17) dressed in a many-layered, bejeweled costume as she poses dramatically in front of a Japanese screen.134 Clearly, Eleanor Antin

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the Ballets Russes participated in a long Orientalist tradition by stitching together and exoticizing various Eastern narratives and motifs. To a large degree, the achievements of the first season of the Ballets Russes were due to the dancer and actor Ida Rubinstein, who starred in Cléopâtre, Schéhérazade, and La Légende de Joseph (1914), all of which feature Near Eastern themes. Born into a wealthy family of Russian-Jewish bankers, Rubinstein studied acting and mime. She made a name for herself when, in response to censure by the Orthodox Church, she mimed rather than spoke the words of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, all the time dancing “voluptuously to insinuating oriental music [and] discarding brilliantly colored veils one by one until only a wisp of dark chiffon covered her loins.”135 In the title role of Diaghilev’s Cléopâtre, which garnered her great fame and notoriety, she was celebrated for her “marvelous Eastern profile and narrow almond-shaped eyes,” which, one critic said, were “appropriate for the role.”136 Rubinstein is said to have possessed great beauty, stage presence, and sensuality—all of which her contemporaries attributed to her Jewishness. In fact, her dramatic performance and apparently Semitic appearance led her to be deemed “a real, fatal enchantress in the tradition of the cruel and grasping Astarte [ancient Near Eastern fertility goddess].”137 Jean Cocteau was a devotee entranced by the dancer’s “vacant eyes, pallid cheeks, and open mouth . . . penetratingly beautiful like the pungent perfume of some exotic essence.”138 Because he considered her so exotic, Diaghilev relegated Rubinstein to the Orientalist roles of Zoubeida, the wife of the sultan, in Schéhérazade, and of Potiphar’s wife in La Légende de Joseph, in which she played an Egyptian figure from the Book of Genesis who wrongly accuses Joseph, the exiled Israelite who would become Pharaoh’s vizier, of rape. Clearly, part of Rubinstein’s success was due to the ways she and her contemporaries’ traded on the perception of her as an exotic, dark beauty marked by Jewishness.139 While it is unlikely that Said’s revolutionary work on Orientalism had thoroughly infiltrated the academy so as to be fully digested and manifested in the artist’s work, the photographic stills that make up Antin’s portfolio Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev labor in two related ways on behalf of Said’s theory. First, they allow the artist to link the real dancer Ida Rubinstein, who was required to play the “Oriental-other,” with her fictional ballerina Antinova, who was also relegated to playing the exotic “other” in her imaginary ballets. The images point to ballet’s practice of excluding certain groups from its ranks. Second, they enable Antin to exag-

gerate the already over-the-top Orientalist fantasies in which the Ballets Russes trafficked, thus revealing their artifice. Those two lines of attack, in combination with her humorous appropriation of ballet themes, exhibit Antin’s knowledge of ballet history while also poking fun at the so-called objective and universal pretensions of such high cultural pursuits. The photographs exhibited in Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev are sepia-toned re-creations designed to pass as vintage production stills. In stills from the fictional ballet L’Esclave (plate 6), for instance, Antinova appears as a campy slave. She is dressed in a sheer lace tunic, and her wrists are bound in chains. Antin-as-Antinova is posed with hands open and arms extended or raised in gestures that express erotic submission, and she stands in front of a zebra skin rug, a universal symbol of primitivist exoticism. All is not as it appears, however. Antin emphasizes the artifice, humor, and camp factor of ballet costumes and Orientalist narratives by binding her slave with a chain composed of large, flat links that look more like a silver necklace than iron manacles. Instead of an actual zebra skin, she uses the plush synthetic material found on pillows and stuffed ­animals. Similar campy, anachronistic Orientalist elements appear in Antin’s production photographs for the fictional ballet The Hebrews (plate 7). One suspects that Elizabeth Taylor’s and Barbra Streisand’s overwrought costumes as Cleopatra and Nefertiti were Antin’s inspiration. Like Taylor as Cleopatra, Antin’s face appears to have been stained dark. She wears thick kohl around her eyes, a shoulder-length wig of straight black hair, and a long tunic made from geometric fabric. Positioned in front of a plain backdrop and next to a bushy fern plant, Antin-as-Antinova’s pose echoes the stylized, two-dimensional flattening of the human form found in Egyptian wall paintings. In her photographs of Antinova in The Prisoner of Persia (plate 8) and Pocahontas (plate 4), Antin also references Orientalist narratives. For the still from The Prisoner of Persia, the artist as Antinova wears an elaborate turbanlike hat, wide-legged trousers that gather at the ankles, and a lightcolored, long-sleeved caftan with detailed embroidery along the borders. She stands in front of an “Oriental” rug, striking an aggressive pose with knees bent to right angles, arms overhead, and hands clutching a long sword. With her eyes wide open, she looks to the ground at, what one suspects is, an imaginary adversary whom she is set to strike. Antin’s fake production photographs function on several levels simulEleanor Antin

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taneously. On one level, they read as a send-up of a send-up because of the campiness and artificiality of the poses, costumes, and props Antinova uses. Antin seems to wink conspiratorially at the viewer, as if to affirm that we are all in on the joke, that we all know that the costumes, props, photographs, and fictional ballets are a wry commentary on the fiction but nonetheless reality of Orientalism. Indeed, the titles Antin gives to her fictional ballets—L’Esclave, The Hebrews, Prisoner of Persia, and Pocahontas (which she envisioned as “Poca-hot-ass”)—reference both the discourses of Orientalism and primitivism that are the bedrock of modern art practices and the Orientalist productions that Diaghilev mounted. By employing already exaggerated representations of “otherness,” slavery, and submission, Antin emphasized the excessive and overdetermined nature of Orientalist narratives that also ensnare the artist as a Jewish woman. At the same time, the photographs demonstrate that, through her embodiment of Antinova as the exotic and erotic “other” of Orientalist narratives, Antin identifies with that characterization. In fact, the joie de vivre with which the artist plays the role of Antinova, the black ballerina who is herself “other,” playing the role of yet another “other” (of Persian, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Native American descent), suggests that Antin delighted in the temporary exponential “otherness” enacted during the making of the photographs, in addition to enjoying the state of being self and other simultaneously.

Audience Being Antinova conveys a number of instances of audience feedback that reveal the important role the audience and their reactions play in Antin’s assumption of the Antinova identity, above and beyond the verification that she passed successfully as the Antinova persona. Beyond craving attention for her persona, Antin anticipates and expects an audience, whether real or imagined, because identity-making requires audience engagement and participation. Thus, even though parts of Being Antinova give lie to the artist’s desire to pass seamlessly into the identity of her fictional blackwoman ballerina, other parts of the book demonstrate that she enjoyed the reactions generated by her not-altogether-convincing appearance. Indeed, although some passages in Antin’s text reference narratives of racial passing and, by extension, suggest that she understands her performance

within that tradition, other passages imply that passing was not her desired result.140 In one particularly telling passage, Antin writes of her realization that the audience “had the upper hand” because “they had [her] in their power” and that she “needed them more than they needed” her, for “without them [she] stopped being glamorous” (18). The Antinova identity requires the “gentle ministrations” of the doormen as well as the feelings of “curiosity, admiration, jealousy” that such treatment engenders in passersby because they “told [Antin] [she] was lovely, glamorous, important” (17). When the artist notes that “the rich pay heavily for their pampered nests” and that “servants exact a price for the warm golden world they wrap their masters in,” she isolates the give-and-take required in identity making and taking (18). She knows she is “really Antinova by the way people look at” her (27). Yet, Antin expresses ambivalence about her reliance on the audience, admitting that she is “entirely too dependent upon seeing [her]self in other people’s faces not to be hurt by a blank one” because blank faces do not provide the recognition, attention, and “admiration” for which she was “insatiable” (27). As is the case with all of the performances studied here, Antinova’s identity required a public mirror, and, regardless of Antin’s ambivalence, the external audience, whether imagined or real, provided it. In spite of the fact that Antin darkened up to play Antinova, her appropriation of blackness eluded some critics. The writer Barbara Cavaliere, for example, in her review of the performance in Arts Magazine, ignores the issue of blackness and blackface, commenting instead on Antin’s sensitivity toward aging. She writes that Antin “speaks openly as a woman to women” about “the problems of the young” while portraying “the problems of the old” such as “their fragile grasp of dignity and their wisdom gained through experience.”141 For Kim Levin, the Antinova performance was just another manifestation of the artist’s interest in “the postmodern subject matter” of “modern self-awareness.”142 Of special concern to the critic was Antin’s play with the fictions of history and personal identity.143 Other reviewers, including Robert Pincus-Witten and Henry Sayre, focused on the performances as performance. Pincus-Witten, for instance, expresses reluctance about the in-between-ness of the performance. In the end, he decides that Antin “skirts failure” even though “she writes and acts better than she ought . . . she’s so good but not good enough (in terms of the demands of the conventional theatre).”144 For Sayre, the fact that the perfor-

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mance was somewhere between performance art, vaudeville, theater, and the movies was favorable. He lauds Antin for challenging “assumptions about what performance ought—or ought not—to be.”145 That these critics do not mention ethnicity, race, or the politics of ownership in relation to the Antinova performances suggests that Antin’s seizure of blackness may have been viewed as the breaking of an inviolable ban while bolstering the idea that blackness is available for any and every use. Antin’s blackening up did not escape the sights of other critics. However the manner in which they explain it away suggests various levels of discomfit with racial politics and the Antinova project. In his review for Art Com, the writer Irwin Irwin notes that Antin, “the improbably glamorous California Artist,” wore “black face” in her performance.146 Similarly, Fidel Danieli writes that the “toned makeup” that had been applied to Antin’s skin “suggested a black heritage without exaggeration.”147 Though the dark-toned makeup on Antin’s skin did not read as an exaggeration of blackness to him, he suspects that other viewers might read it that way. As a preemptive measure, he attempts to smooth over concerns that he anticipates viewers will have: “whatever qualms one may have had about sexist and racial stereotyping in the performance—acceptable in the piece’s time frame—are erased by Antin’s observations about the limits of station and dress that are placed on women.”148 Danieli quells his own fears that Antin is behaving in a racist way, by citing the artist’s struggle against sexism and noting that the character Antinova speaks constantly of “the discrimination [she] encountered” as “a member of a minority.”149 For Danieli, Antin’s engagement of issues surrounding class- and gender-based discrimination demonstrates that the Antinova performance is not racist, a determination he extends to the artist as well. According to his logic, concern for one aspect of the politics of identity, let’s say class, automatically makes one concerned about all others, say gender and race. That reasoning is naïve at best and deeply destructive at worst, for it ignores the difficulties that those with intersected identifications experience. Other writers were considerably more critical of Antin’s performance as Antinova. In her description of the performance that lasted three weeks, art historian RoseLee Goldberg writes that Antin “stalked the city as a ‘darkee’.”150 It was “not surprising,” she continues, that “no one seemed to find” Antin’s blackface “terribly amusing.”151 Performance critic and historian Sally Banes registered the most pointed critique of Antin’s Antinova

project, calling it “a bad racist joke.”152 Goldberg and Banes articulated a political corrective that others were unwilling or unmotivated to issue. Antin’s friends and acquaintances had a variety of reactions, most of which she chose to interpret positively. The artist reports, for example, that, upon arriving at the gallery to install the exhibition for Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, the gallerist Ronald Feldman stared at me “without recognition.” Though he eventually jumps up to kiss her, Antin thinks he recognized her “only because he’s been expecting” her.153 The artist informs readers of another incident in which two art-world friends “ignored” her (20). Antin recalls one occasion when, due to her disguise, a friend, the art historian Jonathan Crary, ignored her and her overt flirtations before finally recognizing her. These reactions lead Antin to determine that her “friends agreed I had become something of an improvement over myself” (15) because they could not “get over how glamorous” she was (54). If the artist concluded that such incidents were evidence that her assumed identity as a black ballerina worked, real proof that she was passing successfully was not forthcoming. Indeed, anecdotes from Being Antinova suggest otherwise. Antin recalls that whites often perceived her as having a tan and that, on two separate occasions, she received compliments on it. The first instance occurred in the realm of the art world: the artist reported that she remained quiet and smiled “mysteriously” when her “high color confused” two colleagues (10). In Antin’s retelling, the women compliment her skin tone several times, which leads her to surmise that they are “jealous” of her “wonderful tan” (10). Responding with “I know, I was born that way,” the artist deflects attention away from her skin color while also castigating the colleagues for, what Antin perceives as, their rudeness (10). The second instance took place outside the art world when a cab driver expressed approval of her “great tan” (17). The artist wrote that her disapproval of his perception of her coloring as a tan was so great that she “glare[d] at him so fiercely” he stopped laughing (17). She follows that up with the declaration, “Yes, I’m colored. Now keep your eyes on the road” (17), which, one suspects, was meant to put the driver in his place. Antin’s use of the word “colored” is significant and multivalent. It alludes both to the idea that she could easily color her characters black and to the fact that Antin had literally “colored” herself with skin-shading cosmetics in order to pass off her otherwise light skin as dark. But her use of the antiquated term “colored” in 1981 also hearkens back to the Jim

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Crow era when people of African descent in the United States were not called African American or black but “colored.” In this way, Antin signifies on the cabbie’s good-natured reaction to her coloring, using it as an impetus to project racist attitudes and actions onto him. The artist makes the unsuspecting driver participate in a racialist drama in which she plays black “other” to his white “non-other.” According to the fantasy with which Antin shrouds the interaction, he becomes a Jim-Crow sympathizer who employs the derogatory and passé word “colored” to describe an individual of African descent. The artist takes her fantasy of racial strife even further, imagining, contrary to the evidence provided, that the cabdriver must be “afraid” that she, ostensibly a black person, is “going to rob him” (17). In this case, as in others, Antin projects racist attitudes onto people whose actions, according to her written descriptions, do not appear to be racist and whose only offense was to act outside the parameters she prescribes. As readers, we are forced either to agree with the artist’s determination that the offending people have acted in racist ways or to disagree with the interpretations of Antin’s faulty narration and, in turn, side with the people she deems discriminatory. When readers acknowledge, as they must, that her interpretations are off the mark, then they are left with two options: to perform the rather benign action of rolling their eyes at her over-the-top assessments, or to develop contempt for, what some call, the oversensitivity that Antin, as the bearer of blackness and “otherness,” enacts. The oversensitivity or race-paranoia that Antin models is supposed to be characteristic of minoritarian groups, which are said to make equivalences between garden-variety rudeness and overt discriminatory practices, regarding each as an abuse of their human rights. That the artist projects racist fantasies onto whites almost indiscriminately suggests an ambition to identify with and experience herself as “other.” Yet, Antin’s acting out race-paranoia places her readers in a position to disregard and diminish the xenophobia that minoritarian groups experience, which, in combination with her masquerade in blackface and her usurpation of blackness, intimates an affiliation with whiteness and its attendant privileges.154 That nonwhites were also unconvinced by Antin’s performance as Antinova goes without saying. Even though passing was not the artist’s ultimate goal, she exhibits some tetchiness in her recollections of nonwhites in Being Antinova, as if she secretly courted their approval of her performance of blackness. Her first face-to-face encounter with a black person

came on the first day of her three-week masquerade, when she began arranging the exhibition Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev. Antin recalls that the staff looked on in anticipation when the young man delivered lunch to the gallery. “Afraid to look at him, her first black person,” she looks up and “smiles determinedly” at the place “where his eyes should be” (7). His “friendly face” suggested that he was “unabashedly interested,” and she felt “gratitude” (7). Then, she admits, his eyes went “blank,” “withdrew,” and turned “inward” as though he did not see her “anymore at all” (7). She reports feeling like she had been “dismissed from his mind” and as though everyone in the room knew she had “been snubbed” (7–8). Antin’s first response to this embarrassing interaction was to turn against herself and the costume (8). The dark makeup “settled into the creases” of her skin and made her hands “look gnarled like an old woman’s,” she notes, so she looked older than her age (8). Curiously, the artist never blames her inability to look black convincingly for the young man’s disapproving reaction or acknowledges that her appropriation of blackness might have triggered it. Her next response was to turn against the black youth. She remembers fending off the rebuff by reminding herself of class hierarchy and that “ballerinas have no relation to delivery boys” (8). Reminding herself of the class position that the fictional ballerina might hold, Antin assumes a haughty affect which leads her to describe his facial features as “African looking” and his black skin so “dark” that it appeared “blue” (8). “He’s not even good looking, looks like a field hand” (8). Try as she may, the artist could not separate Antin from Antinova. “This is becoming too personal,” she admits (8). In those passages, it is difficult to determine from which voice Antin speaks. Was she channeling the elevated position of the black woman dancer Antinova? If so, then was she acting out an intraracial melodrama in which a light-skinned and cosmopolitan African American discriminates against a darker, lower-class African American? Or, was she speaking from the point of view of her fantasy of a liberal white feminist who had expectations of privilege and entitlement? In that case, was Antin distinguishing herself from that group by mocking their expectation of attention and power? Or, did Antin speak with her own voice and on her own behalf, as a spurned woman who did not receive the kind of notice she desired? If so, then is she manifesting her identification with the “other” by tapping into a well of feelings of disrespect and disregard that, she assumes, Eleanor Antin

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attend subalternity? The way in which Antin narrates her recollection of this event is yet another instance of the deftness with which she occupies multiple positions simultaneously and speaks many voices at once. Likewise, it illustrates the difficulty in parceling out whether she was voicing sentiments she understood to be exaggerated. Though Antin records the reactions of three black women to Antinova in Being Antinova, she seems to have been decidedly more interested in the reactions of black men. In an interview with Nancy Bowen, Antin said that she was “not one of those people who came out of the ’60s movement . . . fascinated by black men as sexual objects” because she “certainly didn’t want to get raped.”155 Statements such as that demonstrate that, regardless of whether Antin harbored fantasies about black male lust for white female flesh or rehearsed the stereotypes of the black male as sexual predator as a critical strategy, the end result was a reinforcement of the stereotypes of black masculinity. Antin’s actions and writing suggest that she found blackness and black people so attractive that she lamented becoming “an invisible woman” when she stopped wearing blackface. Her use of the phrase “invisible woman” resonates with the title of Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (1947). For Ellison, “invisible” describes the debased position of black men in American society. In Antin’s hands, the phrase refers not to the Invisible (black) Man’s likely consort, that is, the Invisible (black) Woman, but to the white woman who could be dubbed the Highly Visible Woman because of her valued position within the white patriarchy. Antin recalls that, when she removed the Antinova mask and resumed her life as an (ostensibly) unmarked white woman (or Highly Visible Woman), “not one black person has seen me all day,” “they walk by me as if I wasn’t there” (83). When she “stared morosely into the eyes of a black man,” she got no response, “zero” (83). She confesses to playing “the clown, the fool, anything to catch people’s attention” because she “dreaded not being noticed” (20). She recalls missing “the silent approving glances of black men” as well as “the calculating scrutiny of the black women” because “they were both acknowledgements” (83). “I’ve lost my people,” she said (83). Antin’s response to returning to whiteness and leaving the position of marked “other” was ambivalent. On the one hand, when she fails to get the attention and acknowledgment she desires, she turns against the group she attempts to embody and attract, assuming the entitlement and privilege of whiteness. Then, she projects racist attitudes onto African Ameri-

cans, calling them “racists” for not reacting to her in the ways she would like (83). “Who are they to treat me like that? Fuck them!” (83). On the other hand, when she resumes her own appearance and identity, she writes that she feels “insulted” and “angry,” as if she had been “drummed out,” “dropped,” and “lost” as “just another white woman” in a city “full of” white women (83). Here, she laments the loss not just of a community (to which she imagined she belonged) but also of an outward manifestation of her identification and “otherness.” One moment, Antin embodies the stereotype of patriarchal white womanhood, claiming reverse discrimination, and the next, she mourns the passing of Antinova, the loss of her blackness, and the demise of her outward otherness. More than demonstrations of Antin’s fluid transition between white/ black, observer/observed, subject/object, and self/“other,” these passages are testaments to her complicated relationship with audience as well as reminders of the importance of audience to the project of the politics of identity and identity making. In some instances, the audience functions as a mirror to show the artist what it sees, and in others, it plays the role of uncritical and duplicitous coconspirator. Audience was a necessary part of the performance because it was with their participation, whether inadvertent or intentional, that Antin negotiated and claimed her new ­identifications.

Conclusion In collapsing the archetypes of artist and ballerina with the stereotypes of black women and African Americans in the Antinova project, Antin not only built a mythic, modernist history for herself and her persona but she also short-circuited the meanings of the various signs she used in clever ways. More to the point, by animating the narratives associated with the various stereotypes, she limited and questioned their ability to represent their signifieds. Folding together these conventional narratives and overdetermined signs allowed the artist to experience herself as doubly “other”: she could temporarily enact the ultrafeminine ethereality associated with white womanhood and embodied in the ballerina, and she could momentarily possess the power, sensuousness, and glamour represented in the figure of the black woman. Rather than validating the identities that the stereotypes represent, Antin’s animation of various stereotypical signs and narratives showed the arbitrariness of the constructs and highjacked their significance through sheer excess. Being the black woman ballerina Eleanor Antin

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Eleanora Antinova enabled Antin to illustrate the overdeterminedness of these stereotypes, to reclaim her difference as Jewish, and to experience simultaneous consciousness as self and “other.” Recall Craig Owens’s article “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” which applauds feminist art for its insistence on otherness. Ironically, though the essay’s title mentions “the discourse of others,” Owens is not at all concerned with other “others,” or with how feminism learned from earlier movements initiated by “others,” such as civil rights and black nationalism. In other words, Owens is not bothered with how racial discourse contributes to postmodernism or with how intersected identifications resonate. He advocates on behalf of difference and for autonomy and equality within difference, but hierarchy still rears its head, and the privileged maintain their positions. So it is with the Antinova performances: Antin challenges essentialist notions of identity, proposes a radical simultaneity of self and other, and reinforces the historic link between blackness and “otherness,” fortifying its and black people’s diminished place in American society and culture.

3 —

“Other-Oriented” Performance Anna Deavere Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles

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riginally mounted at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum in the spring of 1993, Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is a compelling and virtuosic one-woman play or “monopolylogue”: Smith portrays about twenty-five different characters whose backgrounds ranged from working to upper class, male to female, lawyer to gang member, and Korean American to African American.1 Smith cobbled together the script for the play and accompanying book from recorded interviews she conducted with some two hundred interviewees, then, using a limited number of props or costume items, she enacted many of them on stage.2 While the narrative is absorbing, that is not what grips audiences. They are instead transfixed by the juxtaposition of the demeanor, gestures, and language of various figures who, under most circumstances, would not find themselves near one another and Smith’s very noticeable transformation from one character to the next. Smith’s riveting taking on and off of identities is explored in this chapter, with special focus on how her switching between personae contributes to the politics of identity, that discourse in which difference is understood to be a raw material from which to make creative products, form social communities, build creative practices, and stage political action.

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 stands apart from the other performances and practices discussed in this book. Unlike Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being and Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova, both being fictional personae fabricated in the artists’ minds from various sources, Twilight has its basis in the recollections of actual persons who experienced the “civil unrest” in Los Angeles that began on 29 April 1992, following, what has come to be known as “the Rodney King incident.”3 On 3 March 1991, Rodney G. King was beaten by four police officers—Stacey C. Koon, Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind, and Theodore J. Briseno—while nineteen other police stood by and watched. Later King was subdued and arrested. The officers’ brutal violence against King was captured on video by George Holliday, provided to the news media, and distributed internationally. It was presumed to be ironclad evidence that the officers used excessive force. A couple of weeks later, the four police officers were arraigned on felony charges. A court case against the officers was initiated after the charges were investigated. Although the pretrial proceedings began in Los Angeles County, they were later moved to Simi Valley, a conservative, largely white community in neighboring Ventura County, where a considerable number of police officers lived. The trial began on 4 March 1992 and ended on 29 April 1992. All but one of the police officers accused of excessive force in their beating of Rodney King were acquitted. The not-guilty verdicts elicited a handful of peaceful rallies of protest and provoked rioting, violence, aggression, and property losses in other parts of Los Angeles.4 The central concern of Twilight is the violent articulation of identity differences: coming together against police brutality; splintering along gender, class, ethnic, and racial lines; and expressing passionate emotions. In that respect, Twilight is also a community-service project or “a call to the community,” as Smith describes it. As the artist writes in the introduction to the accompanying book, she is “looking for the humanness inside the problems” instead of looking for solutions to problems.5 Smith’s democratic ideal is to communicate universally across racial, ethnic, class, and professional divisions. She performs across racial and other identity-boundaries as a step toward reaching what she considers a democratic ideal, to discourage the notion of difference as opposites and to “encourage many more people to participate in the dialogue” (xxiv–xxv). Like Piper and Antin, she models for audiences becoming the “other” temporarily; she believes that “if more of us could actually speak from another point of view, like speaking another language, we could accelerate the flow of ideas” (xxiv–xxv). She

wants to encourage the development of “multifaceted identities” because she believes that identity and character are not fixed but a process (xxiv). That identity and character are not fixed but in process is particularly evident in the video version of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2000), on which the majority of this analysis focuses.6 Performed on a closed soundstage in 1999 and directed by filmmaker Marc Levin, the film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 and broadcast on PBS as part of their “Stage on Screen” programming on 29 April 2001, the nine-year anniversary of the Los Angeles uprisings.7 While the narratives of the play and film are similar, there are significant differences due to the exigencies and specificities of the media: the actor and director of the video employed film cuts, music, and news and interview footage that the play did not.8 Still, the staged-forvideo production casts into relief the challenges of representing racial and ethnic identity and of taking on new identifications.9 To think critically about how Smith arranged the characters and their stories, shifted between identities, and negotiated identifications is the task at hand. We must be particularly concerned with how real individuals with real stories, experiences, and lives were rehearsed and re-presented by Smith in the larger Twilight project. Likewise, we must consider the gap between the real individual and Smith’s representation of that individual, grapple with what it means for real people to be made into metaphors for themselves, and wrestle with how Smith’s portrayals contribute to the audience’s reception of those metaphorical representations. The reception of the characters hinges not just on Smith’s embodiment of them but also on the moments in their lives she chose to enact, when she thought they were most representative of themselves. She adopted language, phrasing, and gestures that captured the essence of her subjects in such a way that their individuality is communicated broadly. The real concern of this chapter and, by extension, the book remains the simultaneous performance as self and “other” that, like Piper and Antin in their respective performances Mythic Being and Eleanora Antinova, Smith enacted in the film Twilight. Smith’s enacting of the interstitial or liminal space of being self and “other” in the film promises a liberal humanist utopian world without discrimination.10 Yet, with its emphasis on the individual transformation of the artist, it also portends a deeply private, individualistic, and maybe even self-referential worldview and discourse wherein the very identity-boundaries she seeks to trespass are stabilized rather than destabilized. To say it differently, the prominence of Smith’s Anna Deavere Smith

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own identity mobility threatens to undermine the humanist utopia that Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 imagines.

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents The larger Twilight project overlaps with the apex of American multiculturalism, one of several discursive strands that make up the politics of identity. Like the “politics of identity,” “multiculturalism” is a nebulous term with a similarly airy meaning. Avery F. Gordon’s and Christopher Newfield’s edited volume Mapping Multiculturalism is dedicated to understanding the term and the discourse it aims to classify.11 Interestingly, even the editors, who organized a conference dealing with the topic in 1992 and published the proceedings from that conference, experience difficulty defining “multiculturalism” and identifying its intellectual thrusts. Indeed, because Gordon and Newfield are at pains to come up with a single definition, they employ the rhetorical device of posing a set of four questions and then responding with two opposing answers as a way of mapping multiculturalism’s unwieldy parameters. The first question the editors pose, “Is multiculturalism antiracist or oblivious to racism?,” is provided with the ambivalent answer: “Multiculturalism sponsored renewed protests against white racism, and yet it appeared to replace the emphasis on race and racism with emphasis on cultural diversity.”12 They expand, noting that, on the one hand, white racism was given “a new lease on life” with the doctrine of “color blindness” which restricted “the relevance of race” and that, on the other, thinking about race mandated a new intensity.13 In spite of these conflicting messages, they contend that multiculturalist discourse sponsored “an idealized equality, an equality among multiple cultures.”14 In answering their second query, “Is multiculturalism cultural autonomy or common culture revisited,” Gordon and Newfield explain that it assured cultural groups that they could determine their relationship to the nation, that it provided minority groups common footing against Eurocentrism, and that at the same time it allowed white people to participate in those actions. They acknowledge that figures such as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor promoted a “politics of equal respect,” but they point out that “unspoken rules” maintaining Western and Eurocentric ideas, canons, and hierarchy often lurked behind such claims of “shared values.”15 The third question the editors pose is whether multiculturalism is

“grounded in grassroots alliances or diversity management.”16 Gordon and Newfield offer another two-sided answer, responding that while the discourse supported alliances between people of color that thwarted white supervision, it also gave rise to managerial terms and practices that controlled workers with diverse backgrounds. Even while the two authors cite a preponderance of “concepts like the boundary-shattering borderlands, biraciality, and intersectionality” as evidence of multiculturalism’s efforts to move from “fixed to mixed” conceptions of identities, they lament corporate America’s use of a multicultural framework to manage how difference could be used.17 Gordon’s and Newfield’s final inquiry asks whether multiculturalism links “politics and culture or separate[s] them.”18 Some commentators, they write, saw multiculturalism as a way to promote political action between cultural groups and to understand the stakes surrounding cultural products. Others, they report, used multiculturalism to “celebrate cultural diversity while preserving a political core from being affected by this diversity” and to avoid coming to terms with how “political, social and cultural elements . . . affect our racialized everyday lives.”19 After laying out the rough outlines of multiculturalism, Gordon and Newfield argue that the term suggests a grappling with ethnic and racial diversity, gender and sexual differences, disability, and international relations at the same time that it demonstrates that the United States has not come to grips with these issues because an “‘American Creed’ of equality and democracy that rejects racism and exclusionary attitudes . . . is in fact divided within itself.”20 They conclude that multiculturalism has resulted in a retrenchment of conservative values. For instance, in response to antiracist projects, the tendency has been to “define race not as a social force flowing from center to margins, from the powerful to the less so, but as the thread of chaos wielded by the margins and the powerless against the center.”21 Similarly, because plurality has come to be regarded as unsafe and precarious, “common culture,” “core beliefs,” “shared principles,” and “bringing people together” have been extolled as virtues.22 Likewise, rather than viewing poverty and war as manifestations of governmental and corporate alliances, they are understood as the problems of specific individuals, and the reconfiguration of institutions through the participation of diverse cultural groups has been foreclosed. What their analysis makes clear is that multiculturalism is a hodgepodge of political, social, and cultural aims, issues, and policies that center on individuals with diverse back-

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grounds and their positions within American society, a very un-unified discourse that was battled over several fronts and in various fields, including art. Lucy Lippard’s book Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990) and Carlos Villa’s volume Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues (1994) are key sources in understanding how the art world interpreted and contributed to the multiculturalist discourse and in ascertaining the aesthetic and intellectual trends in art of the late 1980s and early 1990s.23 Perhaps the most striking thing about Mixed Blessings is that the word “multicultural” appears in the title but is largely absent from the book. Lippard, in fact, was careful not to use the word; instead she preferred “intercultural” or “cross-cultural” because they implied exchange, give and take, backward and forward movement across various boundaries. Naming, nomenclature, and the parceling of meaning were of great interest to Lippard. Between the introduction and the first chapter, the author included a discussion of terminology in which she detailed her reasoning for employing “artists of color” instead of “Third World artists” (because it is confusing when referring to American minoritarian artists who are in fact members of the First World), choosing to substitute “minority” with “artists of color” (to resist repetition), and using “ethnic” sparingly (because, though it references any group with a shared religion, language, regional, or intellectual bond, it is often a code word that excludes people of color). In her introduction, the critic mapped her terrain: the book focuses on recent artistic production by artists with African, Native, Asian, and Latino heritage in the United States and other countries. She also set up a few basic facts, suppositions, and judgments: race is a social and historical construct that is not based in scientific evidence; people of European descent are a majority in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but they are a distinct minority with respect to the global population; people with African, Asian, Latino, and Native ancestry make up the global majority, and as such, they should be more empowered; and art made by artists of African, Asian, Latino, and Native descent has been systematically excluded from the mainstream art world and deserves reevaluation with a revised set of guidelines. Lippard’s basic precepts are sound, but readers will likely quibble with one or two of the author’s approaches. For example, Lippard employed essentialist stereotypes that work both to aggrandize and marginalize art

by artists of African, Asian, Latino, and Native descent. In one case, she lamented the exclusion that “artists of color” have experienced, then celebrated that exclusion because it “offered sanctuary to ideas, images, and values that otherwise would have been swept away in the mainstream.”24 Similarly, she characterized mainstream art of “Euro-American society” as “confused, shallow, and homogenized,” while art by people of color has “depth” and “strength.”25 In another instance, she admitted that the featured artists shared little stylistically but contended that they “have in common an intensity and a generosity associated with belief, with hope, and even with healing” and challenge “the current definitions of art and the foundations of an ethnocentric culture.”26 Moments of autobiographical transparency appear throughout Lippard’s text, and they warrant skepticism. Her “auto-critical” moments are an attempt to share authority with her subjects, gained from the “newly aware anthropology” espoused by figures such as James Clifford and Claude Lévi-Strauss.27 For instance, she revealed that the book was written during her own “decentering” process, when she was transitioning from a completely urban life in New York City to a mixed regional-urban life, as half her time was being spent in New Mexico.28 Lippard framed this move from the “center to the margins” of the art world as inciting her to be more conscious about such border crossings. Similarly, she described the book not only as a record of her own “still incomplete learning process” but also a catalogue of her own hostilities or her own cultural embeddedness.29 In an attempt to share authority, she was careful to note that the featured artists are “peers, who work in more or less the same context as I do.”30 Such strategic transparency can, in theory, be a productive model. But, when Lippard urges “European and Euro-American” artists not to be overwhelmed with guilt but rather to adopt “a certain humility” and “tolerance” toward those with different concerns, the approach is counterproductive, as it privileges readers like herself. That the author assumes the reader is like her and not like the practitioners on whose art she focuses is reinforced when she writes that “we share a society” with artists of color.31 Lippard’s phrasing suggests that while she was writing about the need to think more inclusively, she had not yet fully integrated inclusiveness into her practice. The book Worlds in Collision, which gathers the proceedings of a series of four symposia organized by Carlos Villa held at the San Francisco Art Institute in the spring of 1989 through the fall of 1991, also provides a barometAnna Deavere Smith

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ric reading of how various members of the art world were wrestling with multiculturalism. Distributed in 1994, the publication represents the ideas of a few years earlier, when multiculturalism was still being codified in the art world and had yet to become the object of derision it became as the decade progressed. Kellie Jones, now professor of art history at Columbia University and then adjunct curator at the Walker Art Center and doctoral candidate in art history at Yale University, provided the keynote address at “Sources of a Distinct Majority: Agenda for the 1990s,” the first of the four symposia. Her talk, entitled “The Agenda for the Nineties: Make It Multicultural,” functions at multiple levels: as historical grounding; as a call to arms; and as state of the field.32 She began by crediting the civil rights movement, black cultural nationalism, and earlier freedom struggles for the gains in equality the United States has experienced and quickly moved on to art. She explained that such gains were also evident in art to the degree that a white artist, such as Anselm Kiefer, can make political paintings and that an African American artist, such as Martin Puryear, can make “beautiful” and “formally complex” (read apolitical) sculptures. In addition to celebrating such strides, she lauded other important artistic accomplishments, including the success of Asian and African American filmmakers, the award of the MacArthur Foundation “genius award” to the African American literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the mounting of three major exhibitions of Latino art. Turning to the question, “What are the issues that the art and the artist of color face in the 1990s?,” Jones cited studies conducted by Howardena Pindell in New York and Jeff Jones in San Francisco that detailed how little ethnic and racial diversity existed within the staffs of major cultural institutions and how cultural institutions disregard government-mandated, equal-opportunity agendas in spite of the fact that they receive government funding.33 She was especially critical of museums’ inadequate efforts to meet multicultural goals, including scheduling exhibitions that feature art by diverse artists, hiring diverse staff on a part-time and consultancy basis, and using mailing lists composed of diverse demographics. Her contention that art institutions which focus on the cultural products of particular groups must continue to exist and that people of color should control them is supported by Pindell’s and Jones’s findings, as well as by her observations that artists belonging to marginalized groups

are judged by shifting standards and that their innovations are appropriated by majority artists. In addition to reminding participants that minorities’ numerical representation should translate into powerful political and social representation, she recommends that artists and other cultural workers take the following actions: increase the number and strength of identity-specific art institutions; promote a multicultural agenda that is not defined in an exclusionary or “divide and conquer” way; and support youth, artists, educators, and scholars.34 A number of panels composed of artists and culture workers from different backgrounds also offered their thoughts on the agenda for the 1990s. Many, such as the Native American artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie and Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez, took autobiographical approaches, explaining the role art played in their childhoods and why they became artists, as well as detailing the discrimination they and others experienced in their everyday lives. Others, including African American artist Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Korean American artist Younhee Paik, suggested that artists should work to the best of their abilities and get involved in the art world. Still others, artist Enrique Chagoya, who was born in Mexico, and EuroAmerican painter and critic Mark van Proyen among them, questioned the terms with which the inquiries were posed. They asked who “we” is; they probed what designations like “colored,” “people of color,” and “Hispanic mean”; and they examined the relationship between ethnicity, culture, disenfranchisement, and discrimination.35 Chagoya ended his presentation by sounding an idealistic note: “I wish there were no boxes to put people in, and that everyone were just people. I hope that will happen sometime, and there will be opportunities everywhere and no need to have a culturally segregated society.”36 Thus, even while participants of the symposium were considering what the “agenda for the 1990s” should be, they were struggling with how to define multiculturalism and, more importantly, how to implement the discourse in an art-world context. Some advocated the creation and maintenance of identity-specific institutions, while others supported a more thorough integration into mainstream venues. Yet, all seemed to agree that artists and culture workers belonging to minority communities should be apportioned a bigger slice of the art-world pie. Similarly, while most lamented colonialism—the “conquering” of the “New World” by Europeans, which coincidentally would be marked two years later by the

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five-hundred-year anniversary of the sailing of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and the gross inequities those events set in motion—they were at odds over whether to challenge systematic exclusion or limited inclusion, either by voicing objections on a case-by-case, individual-oriented basis or by addressing protestations in a collective fashion. Likewise, while the artist-participants admitted that their personal backgrounds affected their artistic practices, they clashed over whether to pursue a sort of cultural nationalism that prioritizes one identity position over others or whether an intersectional approach, in which one’s multiple identities are acknowledged, is preferable. And while the majority of the panelists promoted more inclusion and empowerment for artists belonging to minority groups, others came to different conclusions: some encouraged a universalist humanism that is respectful of but greater than divisions; others pushed for increased separatism. In the first few years of the decade, a number of major cultural events that simultaneously engaged, expanded, and critiqued multiculturalism and the politics of identity were mounted. Among them were The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, a collaborative exhibition organized and sponsored by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Hispanic Art, mounted in 1990; Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities, produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in 1992; the marking of the quincentenary of Columbus’s North American “encounter” in 1992; and The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, a show that looked unflinchingly at how contemporary art by African American artists was received by critics, displayed at the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of California, Irvine in 1993.37 In the first few months of that same year, the stage production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition opened in New York.38 It is a meaningful coincidence that these two major cultural works would run concurrently, as each situates issues of identity and community at the center of its intellectual pursuits, and the intellectual projects of each event have considerable overlap, even if their executions differ dramatically. The 1993 Whitney Biennial featured art objects by more than eighty different artists and artist-collaborators whose media included film, performance, painting, photography, and sculpture. Like Smith’s play, the biennial consisted of a variety of identity-performances that comprise

a competing set of narratives. However, while the play Twilight was, by and large, heralded as a righteous example of multiculturalism, the biennial came to be perceived as illustrative of all that was wrong with the multicultural paradigm. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was found to be lacking in several categories. The skill, or more aptly, the perceived lack of aesthetic training of the artists is a point on which many critics voiced disapproval of the exhibition. In his review for London’s Independent, Eng­lish art critic Andrew GrahamDixon cited the exhibition as evidence that American art education was in crisis because it was no longer teaching artists technical skills, but instead prioritized thinking over making.39 Conservative critic Roger Kimball claimed, “There is nothing of beauty or craftsmanship or formal excellence here: no delicacy, no joy, no pleasure, no recognition that artistic accomplishment requires more than political rage.”40 Art critic Eleanor Heartney began her Art in America review with a complimentary approach but ultimately rejected the artists’ aesthetic and intellectual choices on two grounds: first, the works were selected not according to “quality” but for the ideas expressed in the subject matter, and second, the works were derivative of, and did not move beyond, artistic and epistemological strides made by feminists and feminism.41 Roberta Smith was more generous in her critique, offering that there are “only a few instances where the political and visual join forces with real effectiveness.”42 Similarly, critics objected to what they perceived to be an overemphasis on communicating sociopolitical ideas through art. The words “didactic” and “moralizing” appear often in these critiques.43 Graham-Dixon chided the artists with, “Take a received idea (any idea will do: colonialism is a bad thing, perhaps, or entrenched interests are truly responsible for inner-city violence) and then turn it into modern code.”44 The result, he continued, is that audiences will commend their “own perspicacity and liberalism” and compliment the artist for “right-on thinking.”45 Arthur Danto, writing in the liberal magazine Nation, took a different tack. He lauded the biennial’s team of curators for attempting to “transform consciousness” the way that Holliday’s video of the King beating changed society: to make viewers into “better people and the world a better place.”46 But in the end, he judged the show a failure “altogether” because the art was “mawkish, frivolous, whining, foolish, feckless, awful and thin,” its messages never more than “oneline zingers.”47 A few critics congratulated director David Ross and lead

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curator Elisabeth Sussman for “attempting to open the museum to voices rarely heard there” and displaying art as “sober and instructive as the times demand.”48 That the exhibition engaged the discourse of multiculturalism and was deemed to advocate “political correctness” (what some believe to be multiculturalism’s offspring) were the grounds on which critics judged it a failure.49 While the Whitney garnered some praise for its efforts at inclusion because it “emphatically reflects the country’s diversity by including unusually large numbers of nonwhite artists, artists whose work is openly gay, and women,”50 the show received its harshest reviews for what critics understood to be its support of “identity politics” and advocacy of a “politically correct” philosophy. Kimball wrote off the show as “a symptom of cultural degradation” and “yet another casualty of the Culture Wars.”51 All there was, he continued, was “wacko feminism, preening ethnic narcissism, rejection of artistic standards, [and] naïve recapitulation of radical clichés about race, gender, class, ‘power’, and ‘the West’.”52 Graham-Dixon announced that the show was “DOA [dead on arrival]” because it dealt only with “staples of PC [politically correct] thinking.”53 Danto censured the artists for the “callow” and “aggressive” attitude he believed they took in relation to their audience.54 He likened the exhibition to affirmative-action quotas, calling it a “bean-counter’s dream” because it seemed that artists had been selected on the basis of being “representative of some group the curators felt it important to bring into the museum” and, presumably, not on their artistic merit.55 Heartney claimed that the exhibition envisioned the United States as “mired in racial, ethnic and sexual conflict, still reeling from the L.A. riots and the Clarence Thomas hearings and deeply ambivalent about ‘difference’” at the same time that she critiqued much of the art it presented because it could not “look beyond the powerlessness of victims toward the possibility of action and change.”56 She rebuked the artists for assuming the “hectoring” and “admonishing” tone of “schoolmarms” and for creating art that is “numbingly didactic” in its support of “identity politics” that “reduce complex social issues” and “trivialize the notion of art.”57 She reproached artists for taking a “personal is political” approach that is too individual-centered and not collectively oriented, suggesting that artists should deal with “crucial political issues like poverty, homelessness and crime . . . war, ethnic cleansing and incipient fascism” instead of with “bulimia” and other “simplistic notion[s] of diversity.”58 Roberta Smith lamented the implication that white male artists are free to make

“less political work,” while creating the impression that “to succeed, the art of minority artists and women must be closely tied to their personal situation, preferably to their sense of victimization.”59 In all this criticism, one can see the seeds of postidentity discourse being planted. If we are to believe the comments of critics of the 1993 biennial, the show was filled with poor-quality artworks, the artists were self-involved, navel-gazing victims who pandered to and harangued audiences, and the organizers were only interested in meeting quotas. Yet, upon closer examination of the texts that make up the catalogue and frame the exhibition, it becomes clear that, in fact, multiple and sometimes competing discursive viewpoints—some conciliatory, others resistant—are offered in the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition. It is a characteristic that also defines the larger Twilight: Los Angeles project. The overarching theme of the exhibition, wrote then-director David Ross, was to consider “the construction of identity” because it is “central to an understanding of contemporary society.”60 Contemporary artists “insist on reinscribing the personal, political, and social back into the practice and history of art,” despite the claims of “cynical” formalists who suggest that such concerns are “fully outside the realm of art.”61 Perhaps in anticipation of the criticism that would eventually be lodged against the exhibition, Ross explained that “as a museum of American art, the idea of community is literally inscribed into our name,” meaning the Whitney is an appropriate site “for the contest of values and ideas essential to a peaceful society; to serve as common ground for many intersecting communities.”62 Lead curator Elizabeth Sussman used her essay “Coming Together in Parts: Positive Power in the Art of the Nineties” to outline principles that she expects will be paradigmatic in the art of the 1990s and to further introduce the goals of the exhibition’s team of curators: that is, to show that “although sexual, ethnic, and gendered subjects motivate the content of recent art, these identities fragment but do not destroy the social fabric,” but instead they form “a community of communities.”63 She cited artist Robert Gober’s printed newspapers as indicative of work in the 1990s for “it attempts to present a specific point of view, in a form that represents a traditional aspect of collective life.”64 In the previous two passages, Sussman seems to speak out of both sides of her mouth. From the one side, she celebrates “sexual, ethnic, and gendered subjects” for driving the content of current art and for putting forth particular viewpoints, but from the other, she assuages readers’ fears that all those particularist Anna Deavere Smith

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viewpoints will destroy the social fabric and damage the quality of art. Regarding the latter, she was careful to remind readers that art committed to ideas is “not lacking in what are thought of as the traditional aesthetic qualities,” and she drove home this point by noting that an interest in form and materiality is common to all of the featured artists as is the use of the body as an artistic medium.65 Here again, she spoke to two different constituencies: one composed of the featured artists and another consisting of collectors, trustees, and formalist critics. In other words, she credited the first group for their identities and ingenuity and, at the same time, validated the second group for their aesthetic values (that art be universal and transcendent). Despite her attempt to bridge these two camps, which she apparently saw as fundamentally divergent, she did not respect what she imagined were the interests of each group: she did not acknowledge the materiality and form of the artists she discussed, focusing only on the content of the work. This misstep associated the featured artists solely with politics and issues related to identity and that functioned simultaneously both to alienate traditionalist audiences and to write off the artists’ aesthetic work by dismissing their artistic skill and training as well as the material form in which their ideas took shape. Thelma Golden, as one of the curators of the 1993 biennial, characterized much of the work included in the exhibition differently than did Sussman: in Golden’s view, the distinguishing trait of many of the featured artists was that they endeavor “to deconstruct and de-center the politically constructed site of whiteness and its relation to the ever-changing definition of Americanness.”66 Whereas Sussman’s essay works to assure readers that particularistic identities—absolutely to be understood as code for differently raced, ethnic, sexed, and classed “others”—will “fragment” but not “destroy” American society, Golden takes a more intellectually grounded approach, situating her interpretations of the work of Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Daniel J. Martinez, Karen Kilimnik, and other artists within and against dominant discourses surrounding identity. For example, Golden introduced readers to the attributes that compose the “new cultural politics of difference” as Cornel West defined them in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture: To trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize,

conceptualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.67 Additionally, she familiarized readers with the discourse of whiteness studies, explaining that white, though difficult to pinpoint, also constitutes racial difference and that one’s position vis-à-vis the center and the margin is always relative and qualified. She articulated in passing the notion of multiplicative identifications and the simultaneous occupation of multiple identity-positions that is the hallmark of thinking by scholars such as Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Judith Butler. In his contribution “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” Homi Bhabha cited a move toward embodying multiple identifications or living at the interstices of identity-positions as significant to such artists as Renée Green, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Pepón Osorio, included in the biennial.68 Such “in-between spaces,” as he called them, afford opportunities to build community and create culture. In an interesting rhetorical move, he quoted tracts from artist-interviews that allowed the artists to speak for themselves about border-crossings. Rather than conceiving of boundaries between identities primarily as limitations and endpoints, he excerpts the following passage from Martin Heidegger, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenting,” as a way to advocate an understanding of borders as sites of affiliation and consent as well.69 Indeed, for Bhabha, intersecting identifications and interstitial spaces are essential because they “open up the possibility of a cultural hybridist that entertains difference without hierarchy” and form “connective tissue” between polar opposites.70 Coco Fusco’s essay is mainly concerned with how “subalterns” are using art and culture to challenge dominant discourses and power structures and claim the authority to speak for themselves.71 She referenced two events in the so-called “culture wars”—one involving the backlash against Chicanas who protested a film production because the filmmakers refused to hire a Latina to play the role of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the second surrounding the successful stoppage of an exhibition of ceremonial pipes by Native American demonstrators—as evidence of the collision of the politics of identity with artistic and popular culture. Fusco also mentioned appropriation as a particularly useful formal technique, used previously by various twentieth-century avant-garde practitioners and employed more Anna Deavere Smith

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recently by “subaltern” visual artists to assert the agency to assign new meanings to previously oppressive signs. The different approaches that Fusco, Bhabha, Sussman, and Golden took in their respective essays indicate the competing discourses of identity that also appear in the Twilight project. Significantly, Fusco, a producer and theorist of art, promoted the aesthetic strategy of appropriation—­ recycling found objects and revising their valences—as a political tactic, one that Smith practices in her appropriation and modification of her subjects and their stories. Also important is Bhabha’s essay which emphasizes the possibilities in the interstices of identification and advocates the practice of liminality, that is, of occupying “in-between spaces”; this, too, is in keeping with both the narrative of the Twilight projects and Smith’s “otheroriented” acting practice. A similarly noteworthy discursive approach— celebration—is found in both the biennial catalogue and in the Twilight narrative; Sussman’s text congratulates the innovations of particularistminded artists and comforts readers with a multicultural line that diversity is productive not destructive. Equally remarkable and evident in Smith’s project is the logic, put forth in Golden’s essay, that endorses a move beyond the placating storylines of multiculturalist narratives and encourages readers to dismantle their ideas about the fixity of identitypositions and eventually venture past identificatory categories altogether. Rather than arguing for an eventual move beyond “essential” identities throughout her text, Golden articulated that sentiment only in the final statement of her essay. In what reads as a swan song to the politics of identity, she stated that the biennial exhibition participated in the “creation of a narrative which acknowledges the post-national, post-essential identity.”72 Her death knell foreshadows the discursive approach she would take and the curatorial theme she would explore in the exhibition Freestyle in 2001, which boldly announced the arrival of “post-black” artists and art.73 More importantly, Golden’s concluding assertion prefigures the arrival of the (supposedly) postethnic, postfeminist, and colorblind discursive moment. That, of course, is really a return to old-fashioned humanism, which arrives full force later in the decade. The repressed humanist discourse returns with a vengeance at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when, within a year of one another, the video production of Twilight: Los Angeles is released (at Sundance in 2000 and on PBS in 2001), Freestyle is mounted at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), and Nikki S.

Lee continues her Project series (1997–2001), all of which will be discussed at length in the next chapter. A key scene from the film Twilight: Los Angeles demonstrates that Smith’s project presents various discursive approaches to the politics of identity, but in actuality it too sounds a death knell to the politics of identity and contributes to the move toward humanism. “AA Meeting,” a scene situated near the end of the “Justice” section and only a few sequences from the film’s conclusion, presents some of the same challenges that surround much of the art featured in the biennial exhibition: namely, the content is so charged that it overshadows the artist’s aesthetic, intellectual, and discursive efforts. The scene’s subject matter is quite dramatic, focusing on the events that led to the jury’s final verdict in the second court case against the four police officers who beat Rodney King. The challenge of looking at the content of the sequence is tantamount to looking around it: analyzing the formal choices Smith makes in her selection, juxtaposition, and embodiment of the characters; and considering what those choices communicate about her expanded use of certain discourses relating to the politics of identity. The scene “AA Meeting” took its provocative name from “Maria, Juror #7,” whose narration describes the jury’s deliberations in reaching its verdict during the second trial against the accused officers. The title alludes to the emotional turmoil and anguish that jurors experienced, detailed by Maria through her enactment of her recollections and depicted by Smith through her reenactment of Maria’s story. In her retelling, Maria relates her account of the story and certain characteristics of her cojurors for Smith, her now-absent interlocutor. Likewise, Smith reenacts for the camera and viewing audience her version of both Maria and Maria’s performance. The film Twilight: Los Angeles puts these protracted distantiations front and center. “AA Meeting” is an ideal vehicle to study these multiple levels of interpretation because it is a performance of a performance that highlights competing discourses within the politics of identity. The sequence begins with a second or two of George Holliday’s video: in super slow-motion, King, who cowers on the ground, is being beaten by two baton-wielding policemen while the intertitle “ ‘AA Meeting’ ” is displayed and Smith, affecting a high-pitched voice, speaks over the action. When there is a cut to a long view of Smith, viewers can see that she inhabits the persona of a woman identified as “Maria, Juror #7 Federal Trial.” To

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effect Maria’s appearance, Smith wears her hair in an elaborate and elegant style, pulled away from her face and gathered into a full bun at the crown of her head (see plate 9). Long earrings made of cut and beaded metal dangle prominently from her ears. The fancy earrings stand in contrast to the dark gray boatneck blouse she wears, which reads as professional and decidedly conservative. Maria is positioned behind a large wooden table in the center of the frame. She sits straight-backed with her hands resting on the table. Four portrait paintings, enclosed by gilt frames, hang on the dark gray wall behind her. Each portrait bears the likeness of a suited white man. The set, traditional and institutional, calls to mind the television image of a jurydeliberation room. Using Maria’s malapropisms, which include substituting the word “humane” for “humanity,” Smith-as-Maria asserts that the jury members “lost [their] humane in there.” She recounts, “The first time I saw the video I was crying and everything,” but, she continues, “by the end, I could watch it with a soda,” adding a snap of her fingers for emphasis. The jury “saw that tape [of Rodney King’s beating] over and over again in there. Rodney King became like a doll, like a little doll.” Then Smith-as-Maria moves to the subject of the verdict. Recalling that “at first, everything was going pretty good,” she says that the deliberations began to turn when one of her fellow jurors floated the idea that they all give up. Her voice turns nasal, and she wrings her hands, assuming a sheepish and anxious posture. Smith enacts Maria’s recollection of her fellow juror’s words: “Oh, you know, I think, I think, I’m, uh, getting a headache. I think I’m going brain-dead. Let’s just quit.” Resuming her own upright posture, Smith-as-Maria rolls her head on her neck as a show of indignation and replies to the nervous woman, “‘I don’t believe you when you say you’re tired’. I said, ‘I work at the post office’. I said, ‘I work an eight-hour day. They come in and tell me I got two hours overtime, I work two hours overtime, and I do a god-damn job good [sic] of it. And I don’t say, ‘I’m tired,’ because that is my job. And I’m not tired. And this is our job, and we are not tired.’” The camera cuts to a close-up of Smith-as-Maria, who, still sitting behind the table, acts out a memory of the intense reaction one male juror had to the female juror’s nervousness. She stretches her arms out in front of her in an aggressive and confrontational gesture, and her face turns into a scowl. Her face expressing anger and frustration, Maria speaks the male juror’s words, “I agree with Maria. Don’t be pussying around here. If you so god-damn tired get your fucking ass out of here. We got three alternates

who would love to take your places. So get your ass out of here if you so damn tired.” Smith-as-Maria signals a character switch when she stands up and says in her own voice, “Here come the black guy.” Demeanor and posture change from empowered to defeated, as she hunches over, drops her head, and contorts her face into an expression that looks like crying. Smith-as-Maria mocks this co-juror’s behavior by saying in a deep but whiney voice, “I have not slept in two weeks. In two weeks, I have not had one bit of sleep. I have broken out in hives.” Sweeping her arm across her body and toward an imaginary door, she recalls him running out of the room after taking off his shirt to show that his skin was red and inflamed. Still standing behind the table, Smith-as-Maria switches personae again, this time becoming a juror she describes as a “high-class woman, real good job.” Walking to a corner of a room, she shakes her hands at the wrist and stretches her neck from side-to-side to imitate and ridicule this juror’s actions. Smith-as-Maria recalls that the woman kept repeating, “I hate arguing,” until she burst into tears. Still reenacting her memory of the woman juror, she opens her arms in a supplicant gesture, swoons melodramatically, and says, “Oh please, if anybody writes a movie, if anybody writes a book, oh please, don’t say nothing about my family.” Smith-asMaria returns to her own voice to express her incredulity that the woman went on to tell the other jury members “all this stuff about her family which [they] didn’t know.” After that day, Smith-as-Maria remembers, “everybody broke,” revealing “all this stuff that did not have nothing to do with the case.” “Once everybody’s personal guilt came out onto the table and was pushed to the side, then we could look at the evidence and testimony.” She explains that they “came to a verdict on Powell like that,” snapping her fingers with finality. “Guilty. Nobody cried. Nobody argued. Nobody brought up what happened to their sister six years ago. We just went through the evidence.” The scene ends with Smith reciting Maria’s closing statements: “It took us five days to get to that AA meeting. After that AA meeting, it took us two days to reach a verdict on all four of them.” As Smith presents it, Maria hits on a number of conflicting discursive strands that make up the politics of identity at that moment. First, Maria articulates a kind of antihumanism. For instance, by describing the numb sense that jurors acquired from repeated viewings of the Holliday footage, Maria details how jury members became alienated from their humanity Anna Deavere Smith

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and distanced from the real human suffering that the video documents. She suggests that the jury lost its sense of compassion as well as its ability to empathize not just with one another but also with Rodney King, the subject of the abuse. Maria regards the lack of compassion for fellow humans as appalling. Next, Maria details disputes that occurred when various jurors asserted their particularist points of view. For example, when Smith reenacts Maria’s recollection of the female juror’s recommendation that the jury give up, class and economic differences get emphasized. Maria’s derisive acting out of her fellow juror’s behavior makes clear several things: Maria has a strong work ethic that she does not see in her counterpart; her economic values preclude her begging out of overtime; and quitting is not a viable option for her. Also apparent is Maria’s judgment that her fellow juror’s anxiety is a manifestation of class-based weakness. Similarly, Smith’s reenactment of Maria’s performance of the angry response of a male juror to the female juror suggests that Maria identifies or empathizes with his resentment toward the woman. Indeed, rather than defending her fellow female juror or rebuking the male juror for ascribing the female juror’s nervousness to female anatomy, Maria shows her identification with his position when she mimics his puffed-up and exaggerated masculinity in an uncritical, celebratory way. The manner in which Smith stages this interaction intimates the class differences, gender antagonism, and racial hostilities within the jury. Yet, because Maria seems to empathize with the male juror’s position, there is also evidence of the constant reprioritization of identifications. Likewise, racial and class differences are suggested in Maria’s reenactment of the actions of the juror who experienced skin irritation as a result of participating in the deliberations. He is the only juror whom Maria identifies by color, a distinction that may be interpreted as a way of her distancing herself from his race. The overly careful manner in which Maria enunciates the juror’s words and the amplification with which she affects his defeated demeanor express ridicule. Weakness and the admission of physical frailty are interpreted by Maria as characteristic of a particular class. In these reenactments, multiculturalist tendencies to assert and celebrate difference are framed as selfish and disruptive. At the end, Smith, by way of Maria, returns to humanism. Maria’s assessment that the jury could work to reach a verdict only after members revealed their feelings of “personal guilt” is presented as an indictment of ideological differences based in the jurors’ ethnic, racial, gender, and

class particularities. The implication is that a sense of humanity could be returned to the jury only when they pushed aside their differences. Only then could they think ethically and work collectively in the interest of humanity. Humanism is structured as community oriented and constructive. In that way, Twilight: Los Angeles can be seen to mark the demise of multiculturalism and point to a discursive shift in the politics of identity toward an updated universal humanism.

Displacing the “Real” through Mimicry and Translation The larger Twilight project, which includes the play(s), book, and film, is based in reality: it was occasioned by and commissioned in response to the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992. Similarly, the foundations of Smith’s characters are identifiable persons who lived through that civic unrest as opposed to Piper’s and Antin’s characters, who were not real people and are already representations. In fact, Smith functions as a sort of index: traces of her interlocutors remain with her, which suggests that her enactments have a certain authenticity that the previous performances studied here lack. However, lest we prematurely level claims about the relative genuineness of this or that performance, we must note that factors built into the Twilight project function to mitigate and undermine such assertions of authenticity. For example, the play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is itself an adaptation of the Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities project, which was Smith’s 1992 play, book, and video about the ethnic, racial, and social conflict between Orthodox Jewish Americans and Caribbean Americans in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn.74 The process of interviewing and enactment that Smith spent years honing during her ongoing On the Road series, which, some might argue, was perfected in Fires in the Mirror, was then applied to the Los Angeles context with, others might argue, middling results.75 In fact, Twilight: Los Angeles presents a spectacular opportunity to scrutinize the relationship between original and reproduction, enactment and reenactment, reality and artifice. Those same dichotomies form the contours of the intellectual skirmish between mimesis—defined by the Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary as the “imitation of another person’s words, mannerisms, actions, etc.”—and its more sophisticated cousin, mimicry. While the meaning of “mimesis” suggests that an original and authentic person Anna Deavere Smith

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exists, which a “mimic, mime, a burlesque actor” can “imitate . . . in order to entertain, amuse, or ridicule,” the definition of “mimicry” is built on a foundation of derivation and excess. Smith’s highlighting of the incongruity between original and copy participates in the theorizing of radical conceptualizations of mimicry that many scholars, including Homi Bhabha and Elin Diamond among others, have engaged in their challenging of the notion of a “real” and essential identification.76 Bhabha addresses the topic in “Of Mimicry and Man,” an essay that looks closely at the language, rhetoric, and logic of colonial-era literature to show the flaws in the authors’, and by extension Western society’s, post-Enlightenment, humanist rationale. He argues that the colonizer attempted to create in the colonized a trompe l’oeil duplication of himself, “a reformed, recognizable Other, [who is] . . . subject of a difference . . . almost the same, but not quite.”77 In other words, colonial subjects were to be shaped in such a fashion that they would always be faulty, inferior, and less-than-human reproductions, without any purchase on power.78 In “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real’,” Diamond debunked the “truthful relation between world and word, model and copy, nature and image” on which mimesis is founded. She also reminded readers that feminists have identified two threads with which the myth of mimetic truth is weaved: first, that “truth” has been portrayed as “a neutral, omnipotent, changeless essence” in which “the true is the masculine, the universal male who stands in for God the Father,” and second, that “truth” is “inseparable from gender-based and biased epistemologies” in which women are always regarded as inferior and unstable versions of men.79 She put forth a theory of mimicry in which the referent-sign system exceeds itself to the point where the referent itself is destabilized. In the practice of radical mimicry, the performer’s body surpasses the limits of the referent, and that results in a disruption of the process of making meaning. For Bhabha and Diamond, the discourse of mimicry is steeped in ambivalence: “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”80 Mimicry emerges as “a process of disavowal,” a system of repetition with difference, an “almost the same but not quite” reproduction that shows kinks in the armor of power, provides agency for disenfranchised subjects, and reveals fissures in the authority of hegemonic identities.81 That Smith endeavored to employ a radical mimicry is apparent in her offering play and film viewers the occasion to contemplate difference and

question the primacy of the idea of a whole and contiguous identity. Smith’s meticulous system of conducting and recording interviews and then embodying them through repetition makes manifest the distinction between mimicry and mimesis because it displays several levels of conversion: from the interview subject who remembers and recounts her recollections interpretively, to the recording of the conversation, to Smith’s reiteration of the interviewee’s words and expressions. Similarly, as the interviewees’ narratives move from scripting to staging and publication, increasingly more mediation takes place. The ephemerality and exigencies of performance dictate that each of Smith’s enactments will be different from the previous one, the result being another step of remove from the source. Correspondingly, when the production moves from the commissioning venue in Los Angeles to other theaters in San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge, more space between the informants and Smith’s re-presentation of them is inserted. The making of the film Twilight introduces another stratum of translation because, rather than taking the form of a recording of a live stage production, the footage was shot in a closed studio without an audience. Smith performed for the camera, not for a live audience. Essentially, the film Twilight: Los Angeles is an adaptation of a translation, composed of reenactments of enactments that Smith performed years earlier in the play. Like Bhabha’s and Diamond’s radicalizations of the notion of mimicry, the film Twilight: Los Angeles does more than merely reconceptualize mimesis and upset the presumed constancy of the referent: it prioritizes and authorizes difference. “Almost the same but not quite” takes precedence over sameness, and excess exceeds “truthful” rendering, especially given that an increasing and perceptible distance from model to copy is built into her process. Smith’s “big” and virtuosic style of performance is evidence of her radical mimicry: the actor’s difference from her subjects is always on display.82 She never fully disappears into the role and character, and she is always visible as the character and as herself. Her style exceeds the mimetic function of portraying the subject in a realistic or truthful way and makes a spectacle of both her performance and the performative process of identity. She admits as much, saying “[I] use my ability to mimic to sort of get at those moments when people are themselves, becoming themselves in language.”83 In the setting of the theater, her intense method of acting might fit and fill the physical and performative space appropriately, but in Anna Deavere Smith

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the film it overwhelms the confines of the medium. The consequences of this excess are manifold, and audiences receive and interpret it variously. As we continue our consideration of the film Twilight: Los Angeles, we must keep a few questions in mind: Is Smith’s showing that she is “almost the same but not quite” an act of radical mimicry? Is the artist’s display of her dissimilarity a critical intervention in the re-presentation of identity, difference, and the politics of identity, or is it a strategy for reveling in difference in order to engage in liberal humanist homogenizing?

Performativity and Acting In the greater Twilight project, Smith is interested in the multiple and interrelated ways that identity is constituted, performed, lived, and represented. Some of her ideas about, and acting out of, different identities reflect Judith Butler’s theories about the theatrical or performative basis of identity, in which the philosopher suggests that identity is socially mandated and regulated, and that it is constituted by and “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”84 Smith’s acting practice reveals a similar understanding of identity as composed of a series of stylized acts because she seems to spotlight her subjects’ idiosyncrasies. However, as a scholar and professor of performance, Smith has also developed what she calls an “other-oriented” acting practice, “an alternative to the self-based technique, a technique that would begin with the other and come to the self, a technique that would empower the other to find the actor rather than the other way around.”85 The self-based approach to which Smith referred is Stanislavsky’s “psychological realism,” which suggests that the “character lives inside” of the actor and that it is created through the actor’s realizing her “similarity to the character” (xxvi). An actor attaches emotions she has already experienced to build a psychic life for, and to identify with, the character. Psychological realism, Debby Thompson argued in her essay “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” is problematic because it is based in the liberal humanist idea that “all human beings share a common nature or soul, that this commonality matters more than individual differences” and that “actor and character can and should . . . connect through a shared human nature.”86 Smith’s “other-oriented” method allows actors “to put themselves in other people’s shoes.”87 Her use of the phrase “other-oriented” in opposi-

tion to “self-based” alluded to her embeddedness in feminist and racialized discourses that seek to depose universalist notions of “self.” The phrase intimated a distrust of the “humanitarian assumption that we are all the same underneath.”88 Instead, Smith “mark[s] . . . individuality” through speech because, she believes, it is through the use and failure of language that people assume their identities.89 Smith thought that she could embody the “other” if she occupied his patterns of speech and that reenacting another’s speech revealed more about the “other” than could be accomplished in the “self-based” method of psychological realism: “It’s in language that I can find the other.”90 Thus, the actor valued the phenomenology, or physical experience, of identity as much as, or maybe more than, the performative nature of identity: she learns to know who somebody is, “not from what they tell me, but from how they tell me.”91 According to her theory, reenacting the speech of the “other” imprints the experiences of the “other” on her body and psyche. Smith becomes the character by repeating her subject’s words until she “remembers” what her subject’s bodily movements must have been. Smith’s “other-oriented” approach, with its emphasis on the performativity and phenomenology of identity, is apparent in her enactment of the philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West in the film Twilight: Los Angeles. Viewers will see two things clearly: first, West performs a specific persona during the course of his conversation with Smith, and second, Smith represents West when she thinks he is most representative of himself. The result is a metaperformance in which Smith performs West performing himself. Smith’s portrayal of West comes during the “Losses” section of the Twilight video and falls under the subheading “Prisoner of Hope,” a phrase culled from the interview with West. Smith-as-West’s voice is layered over footage of looted and burned-out buildings and factoids declaring that “the riot leaves 45 dead and one billion dollars in damages” and that “three quarters of the deaths were blacks and Latinos.” Smith-as-West (see plate 10) is introduced as “Cornel West, scholar” and positioned in an oversized leather armchair on a set that looks like a personal study or library. However, the intimate, learned tone of the library set is undermined by a green hospital curtain in the background. A small table to the right of the chair is topped with a lamp as might be found in a library and a snifter containing an amber-colored liquid. Anyone who has seen a picture of, watched a broadcast featuring, or Anna Deavere Smith

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attended a lecture by Cornel West knows that he dresses in a predictable, particular fashion. He wears a three-piece suit with tie and cuff links, and eyeglasses that exaggerate his conservative and professorial appearance. West is known to take off his jacket and expose his vest, as if to toil, when he gets worked up or carried away by thoughts and ideas, just as an activist or preacher might. His suit is always punctuated with flashes of sartorial opulence. Shiny cuff links and bright ties suggest a certain dandyism that is meant to display his personal style, subvert apparent conservatism, and indicate his ties to the black church. His learned expression is juxtaposed with a flamboyant Afro. Regardless of the fashion climate, West sports a moustache and goatee along with the full, combed-out Afro that radiates at least three inches from his head. The anachronistic hairstyle is a calculated maneuver on West’s part: not only does it signify his indebtedness to radical politics and aesthetics of black nationalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it also symbolizes his identification with the idea of a black working class that no longer exists. His overgrown moustache and beard, which he is given to stroking while speaking, call to mind philosophers and activists alike. Clearly, West’s self-presentation has been considered carefully. In the film, Smith wears a variation of the West uniform, including a white shirt, navy blue vest, yellow patterned tie, and prominent cuff links. Markedly absent, however, are West’s signature Afro, facial hair, and glasses. Smith wears her hair straight and slicked back. Although she is not above wearing wigs to assimilate her characters, donning a curly Afro wig in this instance would likely have taken the performance to a parodic level. The omissions are functional, making Smith all the more visible. The audience sees Smith, the actor, dressed as Cornel West, the public intellectual. “Cornel West, scholar” is a celebrity in his own orbit, so he is not required to talk about the Los Angeles uprising in particular. Instead, he weighs in on the despair that inevitably follows such violent events and reflects on hope and optimism, using both his philosophical and religious training to remind his interlocutor of intellectual and religious faith. Throughout the monologue, Smith-as-West engages in idiosyncratic gestures, such as picking up and swirling the drink, sweeping her arms in wide arcs, and pointing her index finger enthusiastically at the absent interlocutor, that approximate, but also oddly exaggerate, West’s physicality. Rather than selecting random words that West spoke, Smith seeks and subsequently enacts “poetic moments,” that is, language and phrasing

that showcase his authorship and best represent his ideas.92 If “poetic moments” are the spoken phrases that Smith deems emblematic of West’s essential self, then they are also the parts of the interviewee that the artist wants to emphasize. Once she transforms her subjects into characters, she borrows their words and their bodily instantiations for her own purposes.93 “I borrow them for a moment,” she explains, “to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By ‘us’, I mean humans” (294). In so saying, Smith undermines her stand against universal humanism and turns instead to the rhetoric of locating commonality in difference. In the West sequence, Smith enacts “poetic moments” that portray the philosopher when she thinks he is most representative of himself and at the moment when he is a most distilled version of himself. Watching Smith perform as the persona Cornel West makes it clear that, in addition to the philosopher’s having a carefully constructed persona that is accompanied by a series of “stylized repetition of acts,” he has a particular embodiment that relates to his persona. Smith emphasizes the public persona that West created for himself, which conveys his intellectual, spiritual, and political beliefs as well as his unique physicality in the world. For instance, when Smith acts out West’s defining of “optimism” in the rationalist rhetoric of philosophy and “hope” in the faith-based rhetoric of the church, West’s particular mixing of philosophy and religion is readily apparent. Similarly, the actor displays West’s nod toward racial equanimity and identification with blacks when she includes his comparison of the sadness of whites to that of blacks. Smith rehearses West’s speech pattern by speeding up or slowing down certain phrases, and she highlights his use of alliterative words, such as “decline, decay, and despair,” and the rhyming words “doom and gloom.” In that way, Smith emphasizes West’s roots in the black church. She also focuses attention on West’s body language—the way he moves in his chair, his punctuation of key phrases with pointed finger, and the manner in which he savors his drink between remarks. Smith’s portrayal of West is a metaperformance: viewers see Smith acting like West acting in the way he is usually perceived. Or, perhaps more appropriately, viewers see Smith enacting idiosyncratic mannerisms that they infer must be germane to West. In that way, her metaperformance has the unlikely effect of making Smith, the actor, even more obvious. The display of Smith’s own persona results from not only her strong editorship in choosing “poetic moments” that condense West’s essence but also Anna Deavere Smith

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her uncanny ability to enact West’s mannerisms in convincing ways. Viewers come face to face with Smith’s extraordinary ability to impersonate manners and speech that they identify with Cornel West. Their attention is drawn to Smith herself because of her virtuosity as a performer. Thus, viewers are experiencing Smith-as-herself, Smith-as-West, and West-asWest simultaneously. That West is an icon of the Black Public Intellectual whom Smith includes precisely because of his legibility cannot be disputed. Still, the West scene highlights the manner in which real people are transformed into metaphoric characters in the Twilight project in general and film in particular. Because her condensed depiction of him exceeds his already concentrated persona, West becomes an exponentially more potent symbol through Smith’s enactment. For such a figure as West, who must have realized his own iconic status, Smith’s making him into a metaphor must be so common as to be acceptable. However, something different happens when a person with less experience, and perhaps with a less-jaded attitude, undergoes such a process of metaphorization: the informant-subject stops being an individual and becomes a character, one of many that Smith drops into the narrative system she creates and controls. Whereas West has nothing to lose from Smith’s compressed portrayal of him, a lesser-known, less-privileged person risks becoming a puppet in Smith’s hands. Such a subject is vulnerable to Smith’s big and virtuosic acting style; the actor’s essentialized depiction may usurp the individual’s power. In other words, the simultaneous extraction and amplification of the interviewee’s “essence” could result in an uneven differential in which the individual is disempowered and Smith is further empowered. In the West scene, Smith’s radical mimicry is evident: viewers get a general sense but not a carbon copy of the philosopher because her authority as actor, editor, playwright, and conveyer of information is unquestioned. The artist’s dramatic agency and her presence as an independent persona are demonstrated in her omission of certain of the philosopher’s mannerisms, such as the absent-minded, and perhaps affected, way he strokes his beard and the way his mouth moves to accommodate his facial hair. The inconsistencies between his actions and her representations of them are clearly the result of Smith’s dramatic license and ownership of her radical difference. That Smith is a powerful author whose own body never becomes in-

visible while enacting Cornel West demonstrates her “other-oriented” approach: the distinction between self and “other,” or actor and philosopher, is not only maintained but made visible. Her practice emphasizes and makes manifest “the travel from the self to the other,”94 and it instantiates the “leaving [of one’s] safe house of identity”—“your race, your social class, your nation, your professional area of expertise”—to stand at the “crossroads of ambiguity.”95 Smith not only locates and embodies the liminal space in which identity is neither stable nor fixed, but she also models how to occupy the liminal space, encouraging her viewers to follow suit. Indeed, because Smithas-West speaks to a silent, absent, yet authoritative interlocutor whom viewers cannot see but know to be Anna Deavere Smith, the artist encourages viewers to assume her position temporarily. Similarly, because Smith-as-West points at and talks to viewers as if they were the interlocutors, they temporarily become Smith by a process of theatrical substitution. It is through a savvy phenomenological maneuver that viewers take Anna Deavere Smith’s place and engage West in conversation. In that way, audience members—regardless of ethnic, racial, gender, national, and professional affiliations—are forced to instantiate the same identity-crossing that Smith performs and to identify momentarily with an African American woman.

The Ethnographic Turn In the 1980s and early 1990s, culture workers came to question the credibility of master narratives, those grand stories that undergird socialpolitical ideologies and institutional practices. The objectivity of documentary texts—ranging from social-documentary photography and filmmaking to ethnographies and museum displays—and the unquestioned authority of the authors of such texts—including photographers, directors, anthropologists, and curators—were among the narrative forms that came under attack. James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, published in 1988, may be the most influential initiator of this paradigmatic shift.96 Ostensibly the book is about ethnography and the many ways it has been used and practiced. And while it most certainly concerns itself with critiquing old models of ethnography as well as with suggesting new approaches, the book is really about identity. ClifAnna Deavere Smith

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ford argues that identity is self-fashioned, relational, and always being updated and reformatted. The author’s method is to perform close reads or provide thick descriptions of particular ethnographies, ethnographers, ethnographic subjects, and ethnographic objects in order to examine how the positions of subjectivity and identity have shifted since the late 1890s, when ethnographic practices became more scientific and professionalized. He cites historical events, such as Euro-American colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century and former colonies’ struggles for independence and self-rule in the middle of that century, as participating in the transition. He also notes major epistemological developments, including the reclassification of objects formerly considered ethnographic artifacts into the category of art along with the publication of important works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, as contributing to the change. Rethinking the ethnographic authority of the West is a multifaceted and far-reaching endeavor; it is one of the great ideological foundations of the politics of identity and contributes to the ongoing nuancing of the discourse. Such an epistemological shift revises the hierarchies on which Western culture was based and encompasses a transfer of authority that empowers individuals and groups to define and govern themselves and their identities from the inside rather than having definitions and governance imposed by outsiders. The intellectual transfer alters the relationship of self to “other” and demonstrates the instability of the terms. The notion that cultures, especially non-Western ones, are pure, authentic, isolated, and moribund objects is modified to admit that all cultures are dynamic and constantly changing. Further, it demands that researchers and culture workers acknowledge their embeddedness in particular cultures, announce their political and social affiliations, and make manifest their methods and strategies of study and creation. The epistemological and discursive transformations that Clifford spelled out seeped into the culture industry and quickly saturated artistic practices and products. One of the best-known examples of the trend is Coco Fusco’s and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Year of the White Bear (1992– 93), a performance mounted the same year as the play Twilight and included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition. Fusco and Gómez-Peña created a mythological narrative in which they embodied the figures of the last female and male inhabitants of an island in the Gulf of Mexico that Christopher Columbus and company overlooked. As a critique of ethno-

graphic and anthropological tenets and practices, the performance features the artists dressed in outlandish costumes, made of commercially produced grass skirts, flower leis, and headdresses that they designed as sensationalized approximations of “traditional” tribal garb. During the performances, the “Couple in the Cage,” as they came to be known, placed themselves inside a large metal box that looks like a hybrid of a bar, a bedroom, and a porch and is equipped with a hammock, a neon Budweiser sign, and an old television. They and their culture are supposed to be “pure” and “untouched” by Western culture, though the mass-produced clothing, signs advertising manufactured goods, and television suggest otherwise. Through The Year of the White Bear, Fusco and Gómez-Peña protest the fivehundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s expedition, assert their identification with formerly colonized people, parody the hackneyed ways that non-Western people have been portrayed by Westerners, and make an overall critique of the hegemonic project and condescending practices of world’s fairs, museums, ethnography, and anthropology. A few years earlier, James Luna’s performance The Artifact Piece (1987– 90) launched a pointed institutional critique against the missions and practices of ethnographers, anthropologists, and museums, at the same time that it questioned the manner in which Native Americans are treated in, and represented by, contemporary society. In The Artifact Piece, the Luiseño artist put himself and some of his personal possessions on display at the Museum of Man in San Diego. Wearing only a loincloth, Luna lay on a bed of sand and beneath a glass vitrine, as though he were a recreation of an archaeological find. Didactic labels provide visitors with information about the figure on display; Luna’s vital statistics, including height and weight, as well as other physical idiosyncrasies, such as scars, were “interpreted” within narratives that reinforce stereotypes of Native Americans. Viewers were surprised to find that he was not an inanimate figure but rather a living and breathing person who watched them, just as they watched him. Participating in the reevaluation of the anthropological and ethnographic project, The Artifact Piece critiques notions of isolation, purity, and authenticity that anthropology and ethnography circulate, disputes the dead quality with which museums present non-Western cultures and people, and reclaims the subjectivity and authority of Native peoples.97 Like the performances of Luna and Fusco and Gómez-Peña, Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles project attempts to shape the politics of identity discourse by reevaluating ethnography and its attendant objectivity and authority. Anna Deavere Smith

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Smith herself described her process in Twilight as “a kind of low anthropology, low journalism; it’s a bit documentary,” likely due to the ethnographic research and data gathering she conducts to identify, study, and, finally, enact her subjects.98 The procedures she undertook for her stage productions relate to the documentary tradition because she attempted to maintain objectivity in her presentation of her subjects’ words and experiences. Veteran performance historian Richard Schechner, whose work advocates studying the procedural processes and end products of performances in a dynamic and anthropological way, preferred to frame Smith’s practice in anthropological terms.99 In “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” he recommended that Smith be regarded as a “ritualist” would be in a non-Western society rather than as an actor in the Western sense.100 What she does, he argued, is incorporate her subjects into herself because she opens herself thoroughly and deeply to other beings.101 Schechner intimated that such incorporation is only possible through mutual understanding: Smith must respect her subjects and her subjects must feel the artist’s empathy toward them, her “ability to feel what the other is feeling.”102 He further implied that Smith’s practice is radical in its effort to share authority through empathy with its subjects and is disciplined in its ability to maintain a separation between performer and performed. The artist’s interests in separating personae, portioning influence, and showing procedural transparency are also evident in the film Twilight: Los Angeles. That interest is most manifest during the documentary moments, when Smith is shown interacting with individuals who experienced the unrest. In those sequences, Smith appears as herself and not as a character. These sightings do not show the artist revealing a true self but instead lay bare her negotiations of her own multiple, and sometimes conflicting, identifications. Smith’s fashioning of different personae in the diegetic space of “realism” in the documentary film is noteworthy: it presents an opportunity to observe how Twilight engages and repudiates the authority that outside observers are supposed to possess vis-à-vis the authoring of identifications, which is one of several critical strands in the discourse of the politics of identity. The documentary sequences undermine the stability and wholeness by which identity is supposedly characterized. Though it was produced and distributed eleven or twelve years after the publication of Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (and some six or seven years after the stage production from which it springs), Twilight: Los

Angeles reveals a commitment to the same leveling enterprise that Clifford put forward. Twilight is a self-reflexive documentary film, according to the framework provided by film scholar Bill Nichols in the essay “The Voice of Documentary,” for it seeks ever more realism in the presentation of its subjects, and it pursues an increased transparency of its role in controlling how the material and subjects are revealed.103 According to Nichols, the self-reflexive method shows that the filmmaker was “always a participantwitness and an active fabricator of meaning, a producer of cinematic discourse rather than a neutral or all-knowing reporter of the way things truly are.”104 The self-reflexive documentary film aims to display aesthetic and expositional strategies, such as the filmmaker’s interacting with her subjects, utilizing intertitles, graphics, and cuts to interrupt narrative flow, and allowing the oppositional viewpoints of different subjects to compete and complicate one another. The self-reflexive documentary film should, Nichols asserts, reveal its voice and communicate to viewers its “social point of view,” that is, “how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting.”105 Twilight: Los Angeles is a documentary film produced in the self-reflexive vein. It employs intertitles, graphics, music, and news footage of the events that both provide a historical context and disrupt the notion that the disparate experiences and occurrences of the riots can be communicated and understood as an integral whole. Similarly, its presentation of dramatic reenactments of interviews does the paradoxical work of authorizing speakers and their memories while at the same time undermining tendencies to prioritize one recollection or experience over others. In that respect, the film and stage production are different kinds of texts. Whereas Smith’s enactments in the play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 absorb viewers in a shroud of drama, even as they emphasize the performativity of identity, the combination of documentary moments and reenactments in the video Twilight: Los Angeles provides viewers a measure of distance from the dramatic magnetism of Smith’s performances and affords greater transparency regarding her authorial process.

Performing the Self, Performing Authorship Perhaps the most significant way that the Twilight stage and video texts differ is in their presentation of the authorial voice or social point of view, as Nichols calls it. While Smith, as playwright and actor, is always present Anna Deavere Smith

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in the stage version, she never appears as herself: she only appears under cover of her characters. In that setting, her authorial point of view is most evident in the choice of the “poetic moments” she scripts and enacts; it also plays out in the juxtaposition of the oftentimes-competing sentiments expressed in those “poetic moments.” She admitted as much when she said, “My voice is in the juxtaposition of other voices. It’s in the choices that I make.”106 In the film, by contrast, Smith is present and visible as herself in addition to appearing as various characters. As in the play, her authorship remains present in her selection and juxtaposition of “poetic moments,” but in the video, her role as creator of discourse is very visible in the documentary scenes in which Smith appears as herself. Smith’s voice as author is defined and robust, a dynamic that is fostered by the multiplicity of selves that she performs in the video. Her performance of different personal personae functions at cross purposes, to undermine the idea of a singular and whole identity at the same time that it reinforces the artist’s authority. Smith appears as herself twice in Twilight: Los Angeles, and it is in these scenes that the film’s voice or social point of view is established and that the artist negotiates various personae. While the opening and closing addresses—delivered by Twilight Bey, the former gang member turned community activist and the project’s namesake—determine the emotional tenor of the film, the scenes in which Smith appears as herself supply the intellectual groundwork. In contrast to the opening monologue, which is one reenactment of many from the play, the second scene of the film comprises documentary footage such as direct address interviews and news recordings that establish the intellectual, historical, and factual elements of the disturbances. Between stock news footage of the demonstrations and insurgence are intertitles that locate the event in Los Angles, note the duration of the unrest, and testify to its distinction as “one of the worst riots in U.S. history.” Viewers first see Smith as herself in an old 1970s convertible car that seems to belong to the male motorist (figure 18). As they drive through neighborhoods of varying economic levels, Smith’s voice is heard to say: “The question we’re asking is, if anything has changed because of the riots?” The film cuts from Smith to footage of burned-out buildings and then to a witness interview with a European American woman who says, “I think it didn’t get any better.” We return to Smith and her companion who continue to drive the streets of Los Angeles. She asks, “What about the riots. Was there



18 Anna Deavere Smith and male driver, from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

enough attention paid to the riots?” The unidentified driver answers, “You had to pay attention. No matter where you lived.” Sandwiched between alternating news footage of protests, burning buildings, looting, and distressed riot victims are scenes of Smith interacting with witness-participants; these sequences establish her position as the creative mind behind the film and the social researcher who will inquire about the aftereffects of the turmoil. These roles are further enforced through two aesthetic strategies. First, the names, titles, and occupations of Smith’s interlocutors are not provided; instead, their unique identities remain anonymous. The same goes for Smith, whose name and title are also withheld. The second strategy occurs at the end of the section, when three intertitles, displaying the text “In the aftermath of the riots, Anna Deavere Smith interviewed over 300 people in L.A.,” “She portrays some of these people in this performance,” and “Only the actual words from their interviews are used,” materialize. Although Smith’s face is not shown with her name, viewers should now know who she is, for she is the one constant that figures prominently throughout the various scenes that form the section. Smith is portrayed as the unifying agent. Even within her performance as intellectual force behind the film, Smith performs two distinct but related personae: the outsider and the African American woman professional. Smith’s outsider persona is most apparent in the scenes when she is Anna Deavere Smith

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driving through Los Angeles’s neighborhoods. She is not a Los Angelino, and she does not drive herself. Instead, she is being driven around by someone who seems to know the ins and outs of the city. That she is a passenger allows her to pay close attention to the scenery they pass. The condition of being an outsider is one that Smith details experiencing since childhood because of both her character—she was shy and retiring—and her looks. She recounts, for instance, feeling like an outsider because her hair, which she describes as “good” like her grandmother’s, required a different type of styling than that of other family members. Her feeling that she “didn’t belong” was only heightened by her regular visits with her grandmother to a “white salon” where the “smells, colors, and clientele” were different from black salons.107 In the professional milieu, Smith also reports feeling like an outcast in relation to the theater because her work “is theater, but it’s also community work in some ways.”108 Some individuals might suffer from such feelings of strangeness, but Smith, like Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Nikki S. Lee, embraces the outlook that outsider status affords: she can stand outside and observe, and she can “step in and then step back out” at will.109 Smith’s cultivation of an outsider persona provides her a certain amount of freedom to maintain her individuality, as it does with the other artists studied in this book. Smith’s feeling that she “didn’t fit in anywhere” seems to have enabled her to keep “in constant motion” and have “one foot here, one foot there.”110 She claims that being “in a state of ‘almost, but not quite’” is “actually not a bad state to be in” because it allows her to “move between cultural lines and across social strata.”111 She maintains that perceiving herself as “a visitor” makes it difficult for her to understand “the lines that mark us one human—away—from the other” (48). According to Smith, these experiences not only have prepared her to “live in difference” but also have placed her in an empowered position to choose identifications (23). Remarkably, the same phrases that Smith uses to portray herself as outsider—such as “doesn’t fit in anywhere,” “almost, but not quite,” and “one foot here, one foot there”—are also employed to locate the position of mixed-race individuals in the culture and society of the United States.112 Just as Piper identifies as African American based on her parents’ identification, Smith identifies as African American, even while her light skin and loosely curly hair attest to a mixed racial background. Black/white mixed-race figures have been and continue to be represented as hybrids who occupy a third or outside position because they are “neither black nor

white yet both.”113 Biracial and mixed-race individuals are generally portrayed, on the one hand, as having little power to control how their bodies are read, perceived, and classified by others. As a result, they are objectified to a high degree, and their movements can be limited. Smith relates instances of misrecognition and limited mobility. On one occasion, one of Smith’s informants, whom she describes as a “compulsive thief,” told her that “in an all-black neighborhood, a lot of people may not know that you’re [black].”114 The informant went on to advise her “to change [her] lipstick to a darker color, like plum” so that she may read as black in a “street environment” (22). On another occasion, an acting agent told Smith that it was difficult to cast her because “you don’t look like anything. You don’t look black. You don’t look white” (26). On the other hand, many mixed-race figures regard such instances of racial misapprehension and in-betweenness as a positive condition that affords identificatory flexibility and a unique outlook. Like Piper, Smith disavows the negative aspects of the trope of the black/white mixed-race figure in her attempts to sidestep their debilitating effects. She prefers to deploy language surrounding the place of biracial or mixed-race individuals to underscore the feelings of liberty and power that the position provides. Whether this is an instance of active revision—retelling or refiguring her life circumstances to configure her career, acting theories, and professional practice into a neat, upward trajectory—can be debated. What is abundantly clear, however, is that Smith casts her ability to travel freely between and identify with either racial group or neither in a positive light; it is portrayed as a rare trait that has underwritten her success and that others should emulate. In spite of having her identity misread, Smith maintained that she has “a lot of confidence in [her] ethnicity.”115 To be sure, Smith expressed a strong identification with being a black woman by aligning herself with notions of authentic blackness and adopting a persona of professionalism. That she has a strong identification with being a professional woman is unmistakable in the sequences in which she is being driven around Los Angeles (see figure 19). Smith is dressed casually but professionally. She wears a gray-blue boatneck shirt, and small pearl earrings hang from her ears. Her straight, flowing hair is styled in a tight ponytail that gathers just above her neck. In contrast to a jaunty, youthful ponytail gathered at the crown of the head, her ponytail suggests practiced elegance. The passenger-side window is rolled up, probably to minimize the effects of the wind on her Anna Deavere Smith

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19 Anna Deavere Smith as professional woman, from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

hair’s controlled style. When the sun shines brightly, she wears round sunglasses with dark, reflecting lenses; otherwise, her eyes are unshaded. She sits with hands resting in her lap. Her posture is calm and contained, as she looks out at the Los Angeles landscape moving past her. Her poised demeanor portrays her as the epitome of the professional woman. Hair is an important phenotypic and stylistic sign that Smith deployed strategically and deliberately to communicate her own and her characters’ racial, gender, and professional identifications.116 So, the elegant ponytail and other hairstyles that the artist wears when she appears as herself in the video production of Twilight go a long way toward supporting her performance as a professional.117 That Smith opted out of wearing her hair in its natural and unprocessed state—which is large and full, with some straight strands and others curling into corkscrews—is significant, for it suggests an active negotiation of her racial, gender, class, and professional identifications as well as a keen understanding that hair is an ethnic signifier which spectators can read in order to place an individual into any number of categories.118 Indeed, Smith’s hairstyle choices seem designed to anticipate and perhaps thwart the racial and ethnic misreading that she often experiences as a result of her café-au-lait skin and wavy hair.119 It is significant that Smith chose to wear her hair straight because, within the black community as within other communities, hair has its own politics that shift based on regional, historical, professional, political, eco-



20 Male driver, from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

nomic, and social contexts. From about 1900 to 1965, straight was the preferred way that black women (and some men) styled their hair. Authors Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps suggest that blacks began straightening their hair for several reasons: ease of care, a desire to emulate white styles, and a wish to diminish a key ethnic difference from whites.120 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, all that changed. “Natural” hair—that is, hair that was not chemically processed—became popular. Afros, also known as “naturals,” and braids—styles that depend on “natural” hair—became emblems of identification with blackness, black people, and a militant form of cultural nationalism.121 During certain moments since that time, chemically processed and otherwise straightened hair has been perceived by its critics to be associated with a politics of assimilation and self-hatred. Hair is decidedly meaning laden. Smith was well aware of the long and tangled history of the politics of black hairstyles when she processed her naturally curly hair into a straight style. It was a conscious choice to make a particular identification. Smith’s unnamed driver’s look comes off as “authentically” black in comparison to Smith’s professional packaging (figure 20). He, too, dresses casually and neatly. He wears a short-sleeve, button-down, purple silk shirt. The fabric moves with the wind that fills the interior of the convertible. His hair is in long dreadlocks that extend neatly down his back. He drives a large convertible car from the 1970s that has been painstakingly Anna Deavere Smith

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maintained in, or perhaps restored to, its original glory, and thus stands in opposition to a “tricked-out” low-rider that would probably have been altered by after-market additions. The car’s exterior is exceedingly clean: the paint, which appears to be the original, vintage yellow, is unblemished, the top rests tidily in its compartment, and the whitewalls of the tires are spotless. The interior, too, has been meticulously preserved: not a tear, smudge, or stain appears on the camel-colored material that covers the seats, and the dash and wheel are dirt free. The driver rests his arm on the driver-side door in a relaxed and nonchalant manner. His posture communicates his confidence in his driving skills as well as in himself. The driver’s gender and race in combination with his choice of hairstyle, clothing, and vehicle align him with a brand of “authentic” blackness that both contradicts and supports the gendered and raced professionalism that Smith performs. Smith’s straightened hairstyle, unlike the “natural” state of her companion’s, functions simultaneously to affirm her professionalism and distinguish her raced, gendered, and classed persona from that of the driver who is associated with “authentic” blackness.122 Because the motorist styles his hair naturally, Smith is not required to; she can bask in the aura of “authentic” blackness that his presence, appearance, and demeanor signify. Meaningfully, in the other scene in which Smith appears as herself, her straightened hair is styled into wide waves and loose curls, a coiffure that masquerades as the nonstraight textures of African American hair. By wearing her hair in wavy and curly styles that mimic “natural” ones, Smith expertly maneuvers any negative associations relating to notions of “authentic” blackness while performing the polish and refinement attributed to professional women. The hours Smith logged in her stylist’s chair attest to the fastidious control she exerts in projecting a vision of herself as “naturally” and “authentically” black and a sophisticated professional at once. Smith’s writing continues her combined performance as “authentically” black and professional by making frequent, well-placed references to her personal history and reporting on bigoted attitudes she encounters in the workplace. For instance, she noted that she attended segregated elementary schools in Baltimore and recounts her anxiety about entering an integrated middle-school. She explained that her mother’s goal was to position the actor and her four siblings “firmly in the black middle class,”123 and that she attended an African American church where members fre-

quently “got the Holy Spirit” (62). She recorded the sexist and racist remarks and discriminatory acts she has witnessed and experienced at universities that have caused her “to gasp out loud on several occasions” (68). Of her experiences researching the press and presidency in Washington for the House Arrest: A Search for the American Character in and around the White House, Past and Present project, Smith observed that as a black woman, “I am particularly sensitive to how it [the political society of Washington] has chewed up and roughed up and sometimes spat out, in a very public way, other black women” (75). Here, Smith referred to and aligned herself with the professional black women Lani Guinier, Anita Hill, Maggie Williams, Alexis Hermann, and Joycelyn Elders, all of whom have had nasty and very public run-ins with the Washington political machine.124 Another way Smith defined herself as a professional and shows affinity with black politics was to lodge pointed critiques at whiteness, the dominant culture, and the status quo. She asserted that the “persona of the white patriarch still thrives” (29) and that “racism and sexism” (68) continue in spite of the project of the academy to “question the moral authority and the intellectual authority of the white male as great explainer” (29) over the last thirty years. That “white feelings of superiority are written in stone, as in our monuments” (136) brings her to despair, even though “the antidote to racism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (69) is sought in universities. In the instances in which the artist shifts between her outsider self, professional self, and “authentic” black self, Smith presents herself as an empowered author-agent, but that figure is counterbalanced by the role of neutral mediator that she takes on frequently. When Smith assumes her mediator persona, she remains observable as an intellectual force, even if her physical presence is not evident in the film. For instance, when the artist talks with some witness-participants, such as the Latino man whom she asks “Do you think we need any more social change?” and the Korean American shop owner who informs her that “13,000 square feet of business [is] gone,” she faces her interlocutor and shows only her back to the camera and viewer. In these shots, viewers can hear her sound, and they can make out her back and head, but they cannot see her face (figure 21). In the final direct-address interview of this section, when an African American man testifies, “This country told the world it was the great melting pot. In my eyes, it’s a boiling pot, waiting to erupt,” her body is absent altogether. Such shots portray Smith not as the creative force behind the Anna Deavere Smith

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21 Anna Deavere Smith as visible but invisible interlocutor, from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

film but as a neutral observer and invisible eyewitness who gathers information impartially. Smith performs the role of unbiased mediator in the other scene in which she appears as herself. It occurs in the “Justice” section toward the end of the film. In that scene she is one of at least eight people who engage in a conversation at what appears to be a catered luncheon.125 The discussion is dynamic and unscripted, but based on the cuts that occur within the sequence, it seems to be directed by questions to which the viewer is not privy. In fact, viewers enter the dialogue in media res, with former police chief Daryl Gates asking, “Did it help?” Paul Parker, who is identified with the caption “Free the LA 4 Defense Committee Chairman,” responds with, “Oh yes definitely. Depends on what side of the tracks you looking at, from a black perspective, looking at it from the black neighborhood. First of all, let me make something perfectly clear: it’s not a riot. It’s more ‘civil unrest’ or, as a lot of us call it, ‘revolution’. A riot is a situation where you don’t have no political overtones.” Parker and Gates lock horns, debating the politics of the events through semantics and innuendo, until Smith breaks in with “Let me suggest one possibility here. As much as we all are going to talk, let’s just make sure that we’re listening.” The conversation turns, likely due to a question posed by Smith but unheard by viewers, to the distinct ways that different ethnic groups perceived the unrest and the manner in which they relate to one another since the disturbances.



22 Anna Deavere Smith as mediator, from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

Although Smith appears in the scene multiple times, she is only shown to be speaking once, and, in that instance of leading the conversation, she is depicted as a moderator, an intermediary who advocates that opposing sides listen as well as talk. Smith’s visual appearance corroborates her role of mediator (figure 22). Her straightened hair has been styled into flowing waves that cascade gracefully around her face. The loose curls appear sophisticated and put together, and in spite of their mass, the wide corkscrews are regular and organized, not chaotic or disorderly. They imply that Smith has “let her hair down” and that she is speaking candidly with her lunch companions. The style proves that Smith is aware that straight is the default and, some might argue, hegemonic condition for hair in this country. That she wears her hair straight—the way it is “supposed to be”—demonstrates the consciousness with which she affects a normal and nonthreatening posture, a bearing that is comfortable for her lunch companions. In that way, the artist can maintain her various personae—neutral observer, professional, outsider, and “authentic” black—simultaneously. In fact, the persona of neutrality and apoliticism that Smith created for herself in those scenes is one of the most important selves she performs. In her writing, for instance, Smith constructed that particular persona by describing herself as both a “mirror” and an “empty vessel,” objects that are known for their transparence and reflectivity.126 By likening herself to Anna Deavere Smith

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a mirror, Smith implied that she reflects whatever stands before her. She recounted another aspect of such reflectivity in the book Talk to Me when, during a dinner party in Washington, she encounters a group of politicos whose language and culture are unfamiliar: “If they smiled, I smiled, if they looked serious, I looked serious. At best I was a mirror of their roller coaster of enthusiasms and feelings” (110). When she compared herself to an empty vessel, she suggested that she took on the shape and maybe even the character of whatever has been poured inside her. The actor used that analogy to explain that she presented herself “as an empty vessel, a repeater” to let the words of her subjects work on her.127 She cultivated this “mercurial” persona in order to inhabit characters and assume a slippery position that helped her reserve judgment on controversial characters and topics.128 The floating pronouns “we,” “they,” and “our” were deliberately employed by Smith to evoke neutrality, positional ambiguity, and her own multiple identifications. On rare occasions, she confused her own neutral stance by trying to allow for multiple subject positions, as when she wrote “we tend to think of race as us and them—us or them being black or white depending on one’s own color.”129 In that case, she acknowledged that one’s understanding of the pronouns “us” and “them,” as they relate to “being black or white,” depended “on one’s own color” (xxi). But by defining “us” and “them” as being black or white, she excluded a vast group that did not identify with either category. At the same time, she demonstrated her embeddedness in the black/white racial binary in spite of her efforts to deconstruct that dyad. Evidence of the inadvertent reinforcing of the black/ white binary occurred when Smith used “they” to refer to white patriarchy and “we” to reference marginalized people or persons of color.130 More often, Smith employed the floating pronouns “us” and “we” in a conscious attempt to encourage readers of all backgrounds to ponder their own subject positions and identify with one another. For example, Smith wrote that she borrows an individual and their words “for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By ‘us’, I mean humans” (294). “Them” refers to her subjects, and “us” references human beings. She was also very interested in the “we” of “we the people” that opens the United States Constitution (75). She explained that originally “we” was a small community of white men, but “during the last two centuries, people have slowly, and sometimes in fits and starts, tried to make that ‘we’ seem bigger” (75). “We have been trying,” she con-

tinued, “to make that ‘we’ a ‘we’ that allows more people to have a voice in saying who ‘we’ are” (75). The attempt “to make the ‘we’ seem bigger,” Smith wrote, is built on Thomas Jefferson’s idea that “‘all men are created equal’” (75). “As Americans, deep down we have tried, at least, to absorb and to behave as if we believe that. And yet we’re still confused” (75). Sometimes, she employed “we” to refer to the ideal citizenry that the founding fathers imagined when, in fact, that citizenry was composed solely of white male property holders. Other times, “we” signaled an expanded, more contemporary version of the citizenry—“a potential America” in Smith’s words—that now includes nonproperty holders, women, and people of color (10). In yet other places, Smith’s “we” suggested a liberal-minded but confused group of people who try to absorb and carry out the ideal “all men are created equal.” Though it can be difficult to parcel out about which “we” the artist referred, these passages encourage the reader to ask whether “I” belong to it while reinforcing Smith’s own position of neutrality and malleability. Employing floating pronouns and invoking a neutral persona allowed Smith to identify with a variety of subject positions, even ones that may be antithetical to her own. Adopting a neutral persona may have also freed the artist from taking a critical stand about her characters’ actions and statements, a position that is evident in her assertion that she is “never as critical of the people [she is] performing as the audience thinks” (222). Through her language and persona, Smith constructed an aura of impartiality and apoliticism about her and her process. The film Twilight: Los Angeles is a text with a social point of view, and it voices an oftentimes competing set of politics. That the artist performs distinct but related personae—that of the mixed-race outsider, the professional woman, the “authentic” black, and the neutral mediator—highlights the availability of a multiplicity of identifications. Yet, her performance of those personae in a matrix of realism, transparency, and objectivity, performed under the guise of disclosure and impartiality, takes up the incongruous work of fixing and stabilizing identities rather than setting them in motion.

Receiving Representations Smith’s virtuosic ability to turn real people into representative characters not only results in gripping performances but also leads to confusion on the audience’s part. Viewers often seem confounded by whether to regard Anna Deavere Smith

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the personae Smith enacts as objective documents or constructed ones, that is, are the personae truthful subjects, empowered objects, or emblematic characters; does the exaggeration come from the subjects themselves, from the “poetic moments” that the author chooses to represent them in, or from the artist’s process of enactment; and is it acceptable to laugh with, or perhaps at, them? To explore these questions and to consider how Smith’s mediation of her subjects affects the audience’s reception of them, we turn to “Rocked,” the third section of Twilight: Los Angeles. In “Rocked,” which focuses on the outbreak of civic violence, Smith appears as no fewer than eleven characters whose changes are marked by cuts in the film, costume changes, and intercuts of footage of the violence. One particularly poignant scene shows the actor using body language, symbols, and speech to move between three different characters—the Jewish American Stanley Sheinbaum, the European American Daryl Gates, and the Korean-born Mrs. June Park. Smith’s performance of Sheinbaum, Gates, and Park seems to amplify their characters so that the artist’s subjects come off as iconographic representatives of themselves.131 The scene begins with documentary or news footage of looters taking merchandise from stores. A high-pitched voice talks over the looting footage before Smith is shown to be speaking. Her hair is pulled back into a neat braid, with a few strands of stray hair framing her face. She wears a black button-down shirt and green cargo pants as she walks onto a set that looks demolished. She picks up a blue and white pinstripe seersucker sports coat, when a caption appears on the screen to identify the character as “Stanley K. Sheinbaum, Former President, L.A. Police Commission” (figure 23). As the camera shows a three-quarter view of Smith’s body, she walks back and forth in the frame as Smith-as-Sheinbaum sets the stage. When the camera cuts to a close-up of Smith-as-Sheinbaum, her hair is different: it is unkempt with loose strands curling around and falling into her face. Harried and frustrated, the character communicates his aggravation with Daryl Gates’s actions the day the rioting began. In the next shot, Smith’s hair is again neat, signaling calm and composure. As she removes the seersucker jacket to reveal a black shirt underneath, the caption identifies the new character as “Daryl Gates, Former Chief Los Angeles Police Department.” Smith-as-Gates assumes a defensive posture, putting his hands in his pockets and raising his left shoulder as he relates, in a well-rehearsed and monotone voice, his recollection of



23 Anna Deavere Smith as “Stanley K. Sheinbaum,” from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

the events. As Smith plays him, Gates’s language is so considered and even that his attempt to shift blame is unmistakable. Without any breaks in the film, Smith shifts from Gates’s confrontational expression to Mrs. June Park (plate 11), whose craned neck and knitted brow express the demeanor of someone pleading for information and understanding. Park’s questions of “Why? Why he has to be shot?” and her statement “He was very high educated” puncture Gates’s façade of institutional authority. As Smith transitions back to Gates, her face resumes a confrontational expression (figure 24). Although her enactment of Gates’s defiant posture does not lodge a complaint against his actions, her highlighting of his word choice signals a critique. And when Mrs. Park returns, detailing her husband’s accomplishments with “He also donate a lot of money to the Compton area. And, the Compton police they knows him, and the City Council, they knows him,” the critique is made even more explicit: while the police chief is safe and sound schmoozing at a fundraiser, Mr. Park is left to be shot and killed, unnoticed by the very police and council members he supported. Smith’s final shift to Gates is not signaled with a caption; instead viewers are expected to recognize his particular posture and voice. “To drop in say ‘hey, I think we got a riot blossoming. I can’t stay.’ And that’s basically

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24 Anna Deavere Smith as “Daryl Gates,” from Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)

what I did.” Gates’s word “basically” is the untelling of his story and evidence of revision in his account. Smith has him undermine himself. It is through the proximity and juxtaposition to Sheinbaum’s statements and Park’s outpourings that Gates’s actions are adjudicated, not through any outward statement by Smith of her political stance. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the characters’ words and the rapid-fire shifts between Park’s, Sheinbaum’s, and Gates’s identities make this one of the most powerful and disturbing scenes in Twilight. In just two minutes and fifteen seconds, Smith makes seven transitions between three different characters, accomplished with the minimal costume change of putting on and taking off a seersucker jacket, switching hairstyles, and changing facial expressions, gestures, and voices. Through all of that, Smith was able to have unlike identities reside side-by-side inside her with a pleasure and stillness that belies no sense of political judgment. This is evidence of ambivalence surrounding the discourse of the politics of identity and multiculturalism. On the one hand, the scene supports a particularist-oriented battle over what and who will be remembered in connection with the riots. Daryl Gates’s story, which under different circumstances might be the hegemonic view, is discounted by Sheinbaum’s and Park’s remembrances, at the same time that Mrs. Park is struggling with her husband’s death. Through those characters, Smith allows some measure of indictment against the many social, political, and cultural in-

equities that contributed to the uprisings to permeate the text and be communicated to the audience. On the other hand, however, Smith’s simultaneous enactment of the three contradictory characters, carried out with equal respect, seriousness, and virtuosity, emphasizes their mutual humanity. That results in a message of transcendent humanism. The conflicting ideologies—one supporting difference and shared authority, the other espousing an idea of a unified and connected humanity—leave the audience more room than they may want for interpretation. Add to that the artist’s cultivation of a radical mimicry which creates an “obvious gap between the real person and [her] attempt to seem like them.”132 With the excesses of mimicry, there is a recipe for grave misunderstanding. Although Smith explained that she was trying “to close the gap between us,” she is also “willing to display [her] own unlikeness” from her subjects and characters and to “applaud the gap between us” (xxxviii, italics in original). It may be in that unlikeness that problems arise. Indeed, Smith’s “other-oriented” practice may strike the perfect balance between distance and editorial ambivalence that allows audiences to ridicule and deride her subjects. Several critics commented on the text’s availability to be received and interpreted variously. Theater critic Robert Brustein noted in his review of the production that Smith is “not only an objective ear but a characterizing voice, and just as she shapes her text through editing and selection, so she achieves her emphasis through gesture and intonation.”133 “During the course of the [performance],” he continued, “the actress impersonates forty-six different people, capturing the essence of each character less through mimetic transformation, like an actor, than through the caricaturist’s body Eng­lish and vocal embellishments.”134 He emphasized his critique of Smith’s “caricaturist’s body Eng­lish,” by saying that “from any of those contorted head shots . . . you’d never guess that she’s an extremely handsome young woman.”135 Similarly, Carol Martin told Smith in an interview, “At certain moments your portrayal was close enough to caricature to make spectators uncomfortable—close to but not really caricature.”136 Martin attributed Smith’s approximation of caricature to the “slightly magnified way” the actor displayed ethnicity, but in the end, she held that the technique “underscored the humanity of the people [she] interviewed.”137 Cornel West took a like-minded approach in his preface to the book Fires in the Mirror. He wrote that Smith’s “funny characterizations—which for some border on caricatures—provoke genuine laughAnna Deavere Smith

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ter.”138 “Her ability to move our passions,” he continued, “also forces us to examine critically our own complicity in cultural stereotypes that imprison our imagination and thereby make us parochial and provincial.”139 That Brustein, Martin, West, and others used the word “caricature” instead of “stereotype” is significant. The Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary defines caricature as a “grotesque or ludicrous representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most characteristic and striking features” and “a portrait or other artistic representation, in which the characteristic features of the original are exaggerated with ludicrous effect.” Stereotype, by contrast, is “a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception . . . a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type.” Caricature, then, is based in magnification, whereas stereotype’s basis is distillation. In the Twilight video, caricature and stereotype are flip sides of the same coin, each having to do with Smith’s method of enactment, her commitment to the practice of radical mimicry, and her selection of “poetic moments” to represent her subjects. Smith has openly defended her practice and worked against charges of exaggeration and typecasting on several occasions. In a keynote speech to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the actor addressed the accusation in a roundabout way, noting that she received criticism about Twilight because “the Korean and the Spanish (and I spoke both in the show) was not perfect.”140 She recalled that her critics said, “If she is going to speak the languages, then her accent should be right.”141 Likewise, in her introduction to the book Fires in the Mirror, the actor wrote, “One major concern audiences have voiced is whether or not I am creating caricatures or stereotypes.”142 “Some Black people would say I was ‘easier’ on Jewish people. Some Jewish people would say that I’d gone too far” (xxxvii). She “liked this critique, because it really says to me in a graphic way that as I advocate cross-ethnic work, work that tries to cross the boundaries of ethnicity will be met with caution. And it should be.”143 In one instance, she deflected the stereotype issue by shifting responsibility to a staff member: the costume designer had chosen specific outfits for this Jewish and that black character to wear.144 In another, she blamed her informants by noting their allegiances to visible signs of identity: “What was personally compelling about Crown Heights was that it was a community with very graphic differences. Everyone wears their beliefs on their bodies—their costumes. You can’t pass.”145 While Smith maneuvered the topic adroitly, she could

not adequately control how her simultaneous different-from and same-as performances would be received, nor can the Twilight texts limit reception with the ambivalent discourses of identity they espouse. Smith’s insistence on portraying her subjects during “poetic moments” might provide a clue to understanding this ideological conundrum. In an interview with Smith in Cambridge after a production of the play Twilight, Kevin L. Fuller brought attention to the ambivalent, and sometimes problematic, ways that audience members interpret the play: “What’s interesting . . . is that there are some cases where people in the audience are picking up on some sort of perception of a stereotype, because they begin to laugh and they catch themselves, thinking that they shouldn’t be seen laughing because it’s very serious.”146 Smith acknowledged that such reactions are confusing, even embarrassing: “That happened with Mrs. Hun. She’s a Korean American woman.” However, Smith then attempted to explain the audience’s behavior as a byproduct of her subject’s idiosyncratic Eng­lish and contradictory statements: “In [the] L.A. [production], there were different times where she says the lines, ‘Koreans are completely left out of this society. Why? Is it because we don’t speak Eng­lish? Is it because we haven’t politicians? Is it because of this? We don’t qualify for this, we don’t qualify for that, and many blacks who never work, they get welfare, they get this and this, we don’t get anything because we have a car and a house.’”147 Mrs. Hun’s “poetic moments,” it turned out, did not strike sympathetic chords in audience members so much as make them laugh. Smith recounted one particular performance in Los Angeles during which “a bunch of kids, who I’m sure were black” laughed. “I thought it was black people, black folks,” she continued, because “the relation of blacks and Koreans in LA is so [volatile].”148 Smith tried to convince herself that they’re “laughing at her [Mrs. Hun’s] accent” and never admitted that they could just as easily have been laughing at the artist’s impersonation of Mrs. Hun’s accent.149 Similarly, Smith suggested that she rebuked the audience for their unsympathetic stance toward Mrs. Hun, saying that she was careful to remind her audiences of the hardships Korean American small business owners faced: “But what’s missing, and I think some people know this, is that she’s saying we have a car and a house right now, but if we don’t get some support, we won’t have that either. Many of them couldn’t get any kind of government help, and they’re going to lose those cars and those houses.”150 The artist’s statements shifted blame from herself, as the author-editor who selected Anna Deavere Smith

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passages to represent Mrs. Hun at the most poetic moment, to Mrs. Hun for her awkward expressions in Eng­lish and to black audience members whose reception she assumed is racially biased. Smith’s characterization of that audience’s reaction implies complete confidence in her ability to enact Mrs. Hun accurately, realistically, and without any magnification, exaggeration, or metaphorization. Yet, it also reveals her thespian pleasure in the process and allows her to intimate the possibility that she may have pandered to the audience in an effort to seek its approval. Recalling that on some nights people laughed during her rendition of Mrs. Hun, Smith says, “It would scare me, because—well, because I know where she has to go, and I know, in the sleazy thing that acting is, I need their sympathy.”151 Smith reverted to her neutral and apolitical persona when addressing problems of reception, using several strategies to disavow any role she may have played in creating an environment in which stereotypes and caricatures might be evoked: “I don’t do that on purpose.”152 The artist attempted to defuse the accusation by invoking the responsibility she feels to the people she portrays.153 She affirmed the objectivity of her process and the documentary quality of her interlocutor’s statements, explaining that she feels responsible because “they are real [people and] their words are real” (222). Smith protested that she cannot possibly exaggerate her subjects because she acts out real people who spoke real words and she, in turn, speaks their words in a verbatim and truthful way. Because she acted out the words and language of the characters “verbatim,” that is, the way they were actually spoken, it follows, she believed, that her enactments did not fall into stereotypes or caricature. Implicit in her assertion that she is never as critical of the people she is enacting as the audience thinks she is is the understanding that the actor’s feelings of responsibility precluded her from magnifying her subjects’ characteristics into something derogatory (222). Despite her explanations, the virtuosity of Smith’s performances, in combination with her selection of “poetic moments” and the rapid-fire changes between characters, creates exaggeration and excess, which in turn contributes to a reception that is open to disparate readings. Likewise, though the script for the production is based on the verbatim words spoken by the people she interviewed, Smith did not perform them in a “verbatim” fashion. That is, she did not speak them word for word. A comparison between the transcribed interviews and the lines Smith spoke

when performing them shows that the actor took license in repeating words and phrases for dramatic effect. Smith tampered with the subjects’ verbatim language in order to make some moments more poignant or dramatic. Her repetitions and substitutions of certain phrases function to bracket the language out of its context, which serves only to heighten the audience’s awareness of the speaker’s idiosyncrasies and emphasize Smith’s unlikeness to her subjects and characters. She admitted as much when she said, “I’m taking a corner of the page and magnifying it for the theater. That might also be why there seems to be this greater truth; it may just be a magnified one.”154 Her subjects’ language may have been real when they spoke it, but when Smith enacted it, it was “magnified” to yield “a greater truth.” Daryl Gates becomes his identifying title “Police Chief,” and Mrs. June Park is transformed into “Former Liquor Store Owner and Victim of Riots,” despite the reality of their words and stories. Smith’s subjects become representations of, and metaphors for, themselves.

Conclusion In her Twilight project, Smith promoted tolerance by acting as “other” and self simultaneously. She created liminal positions by taking on alternate identities that interact with each other, and she effectively interpolated the audience’s perception through phenomenological substitution. In other words, she succeeded in extending the sympathy for particular characters with a radical empathy, by giving viewers a way to project themselves into another physical and psychological position. Perhaps the most intriguing and complicated part of the Twilight proj‑ ect is Smith’s re-presentation of her subjects and how that relates to the politics of identity. The artist’s real subjects are transformed into representations, which are in turn transformed into fictional characters enlisted to speak not only for themselves and of their own unique experiences but also for anyone who has ever been in a similar situation. In so doing, Smith encouraged viewers to confront the reality behind the characters’ words. But, she also forced them to privilege Smith as the ever-present, powerful author-editor, mediator, and enactor, a process that likewise takes place in the Mythic Being and Eleanora Antinova performances. As in Piper’s and Antin’s works, the privileging of the maker threatens the difference and shared authority that Smith’s project endeavors to achieve. Indeed, the production espouses the rhetoric of a democratic “melting pot” wherein Anna Deavere Smith

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the universalist notion of humanity is valued and differences are whitewashed. Smith’s process in Twilight promulgates a discursive ambivalence that leaves the texts open to radically different interpretations wherein difference matters, or it doesn’t. In that respect, Twilight: Los Angeles points to the postidentity environment in which Nikki S. Lee creates her Projects series.

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Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the Repackaging of the Politics of Identity

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or four years, from 1997 through 2001, Nikki S. Lee worked on a series titled Projects during which she had herself photographed among members of particular cultural groups. In an exhibition of her work from this period, viewers could just as easily see photographs featuring the artist at a parade in New York City, reveling among a group of Latinos, or performing a mirror-image pose with a coworker in front of a pole at a strip club; they could encounter her petting a miniature dog while clutching a blue Tiffany and Company jewelry bag or lounging in the back of a car with a coterie of hip-hop stars; and they might witness her making out with a woman, swing dancing at a club, or attending an event with an elderly gentleman. The viewing audience would learn that the above images derive from her Hispanic, Exotic Dancers, Yuppie, Hip Hop, Lesbian, Swingers, and Seniors Projects, and that there are others including the Tourist, Drag Queen, Skateboarders, Punk, Ohio, Young Japanese (East Village), and Schoolgirls Projects. Then, viewers would likely engage in an evaluation of verisimilitude: what or who is the constant among the various images? After determining that the artist’s visage is the constant, other questions follow: does she blend into these various groups and communities, or does she stand out

from them? What roles do ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, posture and dress play in determining how well Lee fits in? Is fitting in part of her artistic project? And, how do the artist’s photographic images frame these evaluations? For each project, Lee identifies a cultural group, studies their clothing, postures, and behaviors, and then, after announcing her artistic intentions to become a member temporarily, she spends time with them, performing the same everyday activities they do. To perform membership, Lee alters her physical appearance by changing her hair style, tanning her skin, losing or gaining weight, and modifying her style of dress. She acquires new skills such as skateboarding, swing dancing, break dancing, and pole dancing with the aid of other group members or personal trainers. During her in-group sessions, Lee carries a point-and-shoot camera, soliciting members, friends, or passersby to take casual photographs of the group with her among them. The resultant photographs suggest that Lee enjoys the company of and, in some cases, befriends group members, yet the artist maintains a careful distance that ensures her maintenance of her own identity as Nikki S. Lee, for the majority of her projects take place in and around New York City, which allows the artist to return to her own home, life, and pursuits at the end of a session. Lee’s time-stamped, snapshot photographs which feature the artist as a variety of seemingly real-life characters are taken as evidence of her chameleonism. Critics’ use of the word “chameleon” suggests that Lee has an innate or inherent ability to blend in to the background, to become one among many, to lose herself in the collective. According to them, the Projects series, viewed one step removed, serves as proof of the constructedness of identity: if the artist can become anyone she wants, then the boundaries that enclose and separate identities are not as hard and fast as they seem. Likewise, Lee’s story as successful immigrant is framed as evidence of a rugged humanism: all are equal, and anyone can pull herself up by her bootstraps. From there, it is easy to assess that identification is merely a matter of choice: identity boundaries are fluid, one can really be what and who one wants. The assertions of blendability—once a dangerous quality punishable by law, now a model state of being—that are so often stressed in relation to Lee and her Projects series perform productive, if pernicious, work. Such assessments gloss over the real and tenacious work that Lee must undertake to affect her transformations. They also disavow her intellect, ambi-

tion, and agency in identifying and temporarily integrating cultural groups wherein gender, race, ethnicity, and class combine in interesting ways. In their rush to prove how little the particulars of identity matter, authors of such claims overlook how the artist’s identifications—as a Korean national residing in New York, an Asian living in America, an art-world darling, and a middle-class woman of some financial means—intersect to position her perfectly to pursue, engage, and embody such identity performances, preferring instead to celebrate her as a poster child of colorblindness. In other words, critics who charge Lee with chameleonism accord her a certain exceptionalism that, they neglect to realize, is contingent upon her intersectional identifications and that, ironically, does not so much prove postidentity discourse as much as it retrenches the politics of identity. This chapter explores Lee’s Projects in the context of discursive, political, and social efforts to shift from a politics of identity to the discourse of postidentity, which we can understand to be a series of far-flung and farreaching ideologies, adopted by both left-leaning progressives and rightleaning conservatives, that seek a return to a universal humanism wherein so-called particularist identity-groups, including but not limited to feminists, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and their political and social aims are deemed outmoded, superfluous, and even dangerous to the integration and equality that have been achieved in the United States. I am careful to use “efforts” in the above sentence because they are just that, not thoroughly entrenched or fully functioning ideologies and policies.1 One might argue instead that the pursuit of postidentity is merely a repackaging of the politics of identity, a co-optation of its strategies for alternate uses. This chapter considers Lee and her Projects to be slippery agents in the new branding sought for the politics of identity.

What Is the “Post” in Postidentity? Where identity classification is concerned, 1997 was quite a momentous year. In advance of the census that would take place in the year 2000, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recommended, in July of that year, that the ethnoracial categories on the census form be changed.2 Since 1977, there had been only four designations—American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black, and white—from which respondents could choose, but the OMB decided to add and update several selections.3 For example, “Asian or Pacific Islander” was divided in two and Nikki S. Lee

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expanded to “Asian” and “Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.”4 “Black” was amended to “Black or African-American,” and “Hispanic” became “Hispanic or Latino.” “White” remained the same as did “American Indian or Alaska Native.”5 The OMB’s decision to reclassify federal ethnoracial categories was not unconsidered or self-prompted. Instead, substantial input from sociologists, demographers, advocacy organizations of various stripes, and health care officials among other groups prompted the shift. Significantly, one of the most hotly contested proposed classifications was “Multiracial.” On one side of the debate were lobbying groups, such as the Association of Multiethnic Americans and Project RACE, that argued that forcing the growing population of mixed-race people to “choose sides” was not only disrespectful to their backgrounds but also turned a blind eye to the country’s coming beige future.6 On another side were civil rights advocacy organizations, such as the NAACP, that suggested that a “multiracial category” would allow people to switch their ethnoracial identifications and result in reduced compliance with the Voting Rights Act, difficulty in monitoring discrimination, and diminished support for educational and housing assistance programs among other consequences.7 Still another side proposed, under the logic that all ethnoracial labeling functions to create discord, division, and separatism among United States citizens, that the monitoring of ethnicity and race by the federal government come to an abrupt halt. Ultimately, the OMB endorsed a middling approach that continued to acquire ethnoracial data from individuals but allowed them, for the first time, to check more than one category. This strategy, it reasoned, would not “lump together those who are the product of a black-white relationship with those who are the offspring of Asian and white parents” or confuse “children of Chinese and Korean parents, or Jewish and Gentile parents,” yet would accommodate people who “believe themselves to be a combination of different things.”8 What is remarkable is that, at the same time that the federal government decided to provide citizens more options in self-designation, it resolved to continue to gather and use ethnoracial statistics. The former decision seems to acknowledge that interracial coupling is changing the sociopolitical and demographic landscape and to signal an end to discrimination based on blood quantum, including the one-drop rule. Likewise, it bolsters the idea that identity is socially constructed and not biologically determined. It suggests, in other words, that major paradigmatic shifts

have taken place, that the collective understanding of Americans on issues surrounding identity has changed dramatically. The latter decision appears to fly in the face of the former, for it seems to testify to the tenacious grip that the concepts of race and ethnicity continue to have on the American population, imagination, world view, and policy. Combined, however, the OMB’s seemingly dichotomous assessment reveals the slipperiness of racialization in the United States, the continued relevance of race in American society, and the degree to which identifications and their attendant politics were being negotiated on the national stage in an active and open fashion. The very same year that the federal government is setting the national agenda on issues of identity in decidedly ambivalent terms, Nikki S. Lee embarks on Projects, a series that explores the boundaries between identifications. In 1997 alone, the artist temporarily joins groups of tourists, punks, drag queens, and young Japanese (in the East Village). Her performative movements across these various identifications suggest, as do the OMB recommendations, that identity is ambiguous and fluid, that it is a mere matter of choice. For instance, in photographs from The Drag Queen Project, taken in early February, Lee can be found hanging out in a bar, dressed in an ultraglam get-up, complete with platinum blond wig, black sequin dress, long gloves, and dramatic red lipstick. For one image, she poses with a man who wears a topsy-turvy styled costume, with the left side of his body outfitted in a professional-looking grey suit and the right side decked out in a short, red chiffon dress. In another image, she sits on a banquet seat, flanked on either side by a dark-haired man, each of whom appears to be drunk. The figure on the left, wearing a black dress and sheer black hose, leans into the artist and rests his arm across her lap, while the figure on the right, dressed in black trousers and a red sweater, touches his tongue against Lee’s bare shoulder. Lee reacts dramatically, perhaps appropriate to someone in an inebriated condition. In images from The Punk Project (figure 25), captured a couple of weeks later, the artist is pictured sitting on a park bench, snuggled up to a young man. Her hair has been dyed hot pink, and she wears dark purple or black makeup on her eyes and lips. He performs his membership to punk culture by wearing an outfit composed of plaid, zipper-covered pants, large black work boots, an oversized jacket, and a knit skull cap, while she dons a leather motorcycle jacket, a black skirt, patterned tights, and black ankle boots. Lee wears the same outfit in another image (figure 26) from The Punk Project. Here, she Nikki S. Lee

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25 Nikki S. Lee, The Punk Project (7), 1997, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



26 Nikki S. Lee, The Punk Project (6), 1997, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

sits on the ground, her legs extending out and onto the sidewalk, apparently in deep conversation with another young man. Her companion wears a militaristic version of the punk uniform—black sweat shirt and camouflage pants—and his hair is shaved on the sides, leaving a buzz-cut Mohawk on top. Over the next few months, Lee pursues other projects. In one image, from The Young Japanese (East Village) Project, she poses perfunctorily alongside two young women outside a restaurant, all of them bundled against the cold, and, in another, she and her three companions—all wearing brightly colored clothes and Day-Glo hair dye—cheese for the camera (figure 27). Tellingly, traces of pink dye—a holdover from The Punk Project— remain in the artist’s hair, but it has also been bleached blond in such a way that the black roots of her naturally black hair are displayed. In August of the same year, she produces photographs from The Tourist Project. On the 26th of that month, she can be seen on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, leaning against one of the many for-hire telescopes that are available to visitors (figure 28). She is dressed in a screen-printed t-shirt and dark pants, and she wears dark sunglasses. She carries a pack on her back, and a camera, slung around her neck, rests against her abdomen. According to the time stamp on the photograph, Lee visits the Statue of Nikki S. Lee

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27 Nikki S. Lee, The Young Japanese (East Village) Project, (7), 1997, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



28 Nikki S. Lee, The Tourist Project (10), 1997, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

Liberty the following day (plate 12). She is pictured striking a variation of Lady Liberty’s pose—right fist, sans torch, is thrust into the air, while her left hand is positioned atop her hip. Her outfit—composed of silk-screened t-shirt, red shorts, and sunglasses—is similar to that of the previous day, but she increases her storage options by wearing a “fanny pack” in addition to carrying a backpack and camera. While Lee’s first four projects appear quite dissimilar from each other, there are some common threads. One can expect to find individuals belonging to these three unique groups clustered around lower Manhattan, the area where the artist makes her home. In addition, each group has an idiosyncratic dress code that functions both as a boundary, enabling members to communicate membership to one another, and as a dividing line, separating out nonmembers. Similarly, with the exception of The Young Japanese (East Village) Project, each series is assigned a title so general as to appear universal and yet so specific as to appear particular. The titles open the door for the viewer to relate to the images’ subjects in a commoditized way. “Punk,” for example, refers to an ideology, a style of dress, and a way of life. Punk culture’s roots are rather precise, associated as they are with a particularly raced, classed, and ethnic group (of white, workingNikki S. Lee

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class Britons), but over the decades, it has been adopted, transposed, and some might say co-opted by people who may not adhere to principles that were original foundations of the punk mind-set. In that way, viewers of Lee’s Punk Project have a limited opening onto, and understanding of, the culture of the punks she showcases. The co-opted view of punk culture that the artist offers can be read as a shallow engagement with or as a critical commentary on the proliferation of prepackaged and condensed identifications that are currently on offer. The Tourist Project does similar work, portending specific tourist experiences but pointing to the culture of tourists generally. While the word “tourist” may be applied to an individual of any ethnic, national, or racial group who is engaged in sightseeing, the act of being a tourist is oftentimes restricted to people of certain class levels. Still, being a tourist is performed in quite divergent ways. For instance, some viewers might read Lee’s style of dress as distinctly middle-American. Others might see her Asian phenotype and construe her as a Japanese national seeing sights as part of a tour package. Still others might link Lee to the work of fellow artist Tseng Kwong Chi. From 1979 through the 1980s, Tseng, who was born in Hong Kong and was based in New York, worked on East Meets West (aka The Expeditionary Series). He created a persona by wearing a Mao TseTung–inspired suit, dark sunglasses, and an identification badge reading “SlutforArt.” Then, the artist visited major, international tourist sites, including among others the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the Coliseum in Rome, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Statue of Liberty in New York, where he photographed himself in character (plate 13). Tseng’s photographs depict a figure who is, on the one hand, a rather specific symbol of Chinese communism and, on the other, a universal emblem of “everyday man,” “tourist,” and “art-world citizen.” Like Tseng’s character, Lee’s persona in The Tourist Project takes shape through the various signs, including dress, surroundings, and actions, that the artist manipulates. A key difference in their projects is the sheer abundance of identifications that Lee performs, in contrast to the one that Tseng performed. That difference points to the ideological and discursive discrepancies in the periods in which the artists work: Tseng seems to interrogate the sociohistorical meaning attached to the signs he employs, whereas Lee’s switching among and between identifications, while demonstrating a keen eye for style and flavor, displays a lack of recognition of, or perhaps a disregard for, the historic, social, cultural, and economic circumstances of the identities she

performs. Her series corresponds to the ambivalent recommendations of the OMB and to the postidentity ideology ushered in by its rulings. The term “postidentity” encompasses a number of “posts” and a variety of identifications. Indeed, the assortment of terms in front of which “post” is placed—ranging from post-race to postethnic, and postfeminism to postblack—suggests not just the breadth of the discourse’s reach but also the multiplicity of identity-positions it seeks to subdue. In the discursive landscape that is shaped by postidentity and in which Nikki S. Lee works, blackness, though a main theme of exploration in this book, is one of many identifications being contested in the public and private spheres, popular and academic cultures, and fields and industries as diverse as entertainment, law, sociology, education, and art. The phrase refers, in its generality, to the period after the civil rights and other liberation movements, to a mythical present that is, ostensibly, governed by a pull-oneself-upby-the-bootstraps meritocracy in which the material specificities relating to one’s particular identity have no bearing on one’s success or failure. Though, as Ralina Joseph points out, its name shifts depending on discipline, from “colorblindness” in the legal sphere in which Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres write to “colorblind racism” in the words of sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva to “colormute” in the discourse of anthropologist Mica Pollock, postidentity is a far-reaching ideology that prioritizes individual agency over collective identity, suggests that identity-based discrimination has been eradicated along with other outmoded ways of being, and blames members of so-called “particularist” groups for their marginal or disenfranchised positions.9 Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres devote a considerable part of their book The Miner’s Canary to mapping the ideological geography of colorblindness. In fact, they begin, in their respective prologues, by outlining personal approaches to the politics of identity that each author has taken and subsequently moved away from. Guinier recounts an incident in which her young son grappled with his own intersected identity as male and African American. While that story is edifying, even more instructive is her own coming to terms with her reaction to him: her gut response, she explains, was to couch race in oppositional terms, pitting blackness against whiteness, with the latter invested with considerable privilege. Some time later, she admits to the reader, she reminded herself that race is relational, that the contours of blackness shift according to context, and that inherent to blackness are many positive attributes and not merely a lack of privilege. Torres also reNikki S. Lee

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lates a personal narrative concerning an adolescent belief that the propagation of a population of mixed-race brown people would change the sociopolitical landscape and end inequality. Years on, he explains, he sees how his intersectional identity and personal circumstances—including but not limited to being middle class, Chicano, intellectually gifted and attending a racially diverse high school in California—provided him a unique, if youthfully naive, point of view. He confesses that, for a time, he was convinced that interracial dating and marriage and, by extension, the mixed-race offspring that would result from such unions would give rise to antiracist ideology and policy. He also toyed with adopting the modified whiteness that the identificatory category “Hispanic” promises with its whitewashing of Chicanos’ Indian roots. Eventually, Guinier and Torres decide against functioning on the colorblind premise that skin color is a meaningless attribute that has no bearing on social, political, and material circumstances or on the nationalistic idea that identity is a fixed thing, and instead they invest in and disseminate the idea of “political race.” Political race sees identity as a verb rather than as a noun, that is to say, political race is about doing and acting in the political and social spheres, from one’s individual experiences and for a collective unity: “Race becomes political in the sense of generating collective action only when it motivates people to connect their individual experiences to the experiences of others and then to act collectively in response to those experiences.”10 Integral to their conceptualization of political race is the participation of members of marginalized groups and the linking of their political aims to the broader push for social justice for all people. In the second chapter, they take a scholarly line of attack, detailing key figures, articles, and policies that shape colorblindness. Underlying racial blindness, Guinier and Torres report, is the belief that race—and, by extension, other “different” identifications—is no longer an important category and that it no longer has political, economic, and social consequences in peoples’ lives. According to conservatives, the last decades of the twentieth century form a significant break from earlier decades. When Jim Crow laws were cast aside and formal inequality was ruled unjust, a new regime— wherein autonomy and choice on the individual level are highly valued and “the paramount virtue” is to “treat each abstract individual the same as every other”—was ushered in.11 The results, say Guinier and Torres, are that race has been reduced to skin color, any recognition of race is deemed inappropriate and regarded as racial preference, and that racism is a per-

sonal, rather than systemic or institutional problem, endemic to a few bad apples. The authors argue that the attack on identity-consciousness and the attendant judgment that such consciousness is balkanizing identitypolitics led liberals to adopt a race-neutral stance as well. They too endorse a universalist approach, but their end-goal is a reduction in class inequality wherein other identity-differences are ignored. As Guinier and Torres point out, such measures purposely steer clear of acknowledging the lingering effects of ethnicity, race, and racism on the disenfranchised in, what they think is, a misguided effort to build cross-racial coalitions. While Guinier and Torres aim to abolish inequality and establish social justice for all, they contend that colorblind ideologies and strategies are not the best ways to reach those goals in a society that continues to be preoccupied with color and race. In their determination, colorblindness leaves the disempowered with even less power to challenge systemic oppression and trenchant hierarchies. It makes racism the individual flaw of a single bad person rather than a structural and systemic problem with deep historical grounding. In addition, postidentity ideology conceals a complex matrix of conditions, including, among others, educational opportunities, access to banks and home loans, and poor relations with police authority, that result in racial inequalities surrounding wealth accumulation and home ownership, for example. Moreover, race blindness squashes the ability of civil rights groups to organize on a grassroots level and mobilize political action around their identifications while, at the same time, it fosters cultural nationalisms that peddle stereotypes. In his book Racism without Racists, Bonilla-Silva defines colorblindness as an ideological shield behind which whites “can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; . . . claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’” and above all, “safeguard their racial interests without sounding ‘racist’.”12 In contradistinction to scholars who charge that racism is largely “symbolic” and that race, because it is a socialconstruction, should no longer be a subject in academic debate, BonillaSilva takes as a foundational point that identifications, including race, gender, and class, are social realities with material consequences, in spite of their social-constructedness. That social structures are created and ideologies disseminated to maintain hierarchies and privilege are also key to his analysis. Bonilla-Silva identifies four frames through which racial ideology or, to say it differently, white supremacy operates: “abstract liberalism, natuNikki S. Lee

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ralization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism.”13 Liberalism, also called liberal humanism, is the most salient framing device in colorblind racism because of its reliance on the Enlightenment and capitalist ideals of “individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism,” ideals which, even in their original articulations, were not inclusive but rather exclusive to educated, moneyed, and propertied European, and later American, men.14 The liberal framework is used, among other things to label minorities as “unmotivated individuals” for underperformance in standardized tests when, in fact, such underperformance is systemic and structural; to quarrel with university policies that consider an applicant’s identifications along with her grades and tests scores, as a show of support for meritocracy and the democratic process; and to justify intragroup marriage and segregated neighborhoods as instances of individual choice. In the context of the art world, curator Thelma Golden is probably the first person to grapple publicly with how post-race relates to art. Though she articulates a desire for artists to move past making art that engages the politics of identity in an essay published in the catalogue to the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition, which, as is discussed in the previous chapter, has since come to be known as the “identity politics” or “multicultural” Whitney Biennial, it is in 2001, in the catalogue accompanying the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Freestyle show, that she employs the phrase “postblack.”15 “Post-black,” she tells readers, is an ironic yet appropriate phrase she developed in conjunction with friend and artist Glenn Ligon, to designate “post-black art.” The terms “post-black” and “post-black art,” Golden is quick to point out, simultaneously “embrace and reject the notion of such a thing,” but they are nonetheless historically specific, grounded as they are in post–civil rights debates about the role ethnic and racial identifications should play in the practices of African American artists. On one side of this debate are cultural nationalists who believe not only that racial identity plays a significant role in an artist’s practice but also that it should be actively explored in her products. On the other side are artists who, while acknowledging their ethnoracial backgrounds, think, like Raymond Saunders, that “black is a color.”16 Golden explains that, by the late 1990s, there were an increasing number of artists in the latter category: they do not want to be “labeled as ‘black’ artists” even though they are deeply invested in “redefining complex notions of blackness.”17 The driving question of the exhibition, then, was what kind of art would artists make, artists who came after “the vital political activism

of the 1960s, the focused, often essentialist Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, the theory-driven multiculturalism of the 1980s, and the late globalist expansion of the late ’90s.”18 Freestyle is not so much an answer to that question as it is a survey of responses. Though the featured artists explore diverse issues in a variety of styles, they are linked by their artschool training and knowledge of non-Western and Western art-history traditions. According to Golden, they are, above all, connected by the “individual freedom” to which their art speaks in this “transitional” moment when their own “particular cultural specificity is marketed to the planet and sold back to them.”19 Certain of Golden’s word choices signal an engagement with the larger discourse surrounding postidentity and, thus, warrant attention. For instance, her word “label,” as it relates to “ ‘black’ artists,” is particularly loaded. What she refers to here is a condition common to many artists who fell under the classification “other,” including but not limited to women, Asian Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and gays. Beginning in the mid-to late 1990s, they rallied against separatist exhibitions in which they were divided from the larger pool of artists and shown only with artists with whom, it was presumed, they “shared” experiences and identifications. They took issue with shows that seemed to be based solely around identity. The proliferation of such exhibitions had several consequences. On the one hand, so-called minority artists had dedicated exhibitions in which they were included because of their identifications, yet on the other, their art was presumed to share a similar style and politics that was dictated by their membership in a minority group. Similarly, artists with varying interests but apparently similar identifications were guaranteed access to exhibitions, but their skill levels might differ dramatically. In other words, while being labeled according to one’s apparent membership in a particular identity-group was originally a revolutionary strategy to present art by individuals who had previously been excluded, it came to be regarded as a device that could just as easily limit opportunities as open them. Likewise, Golden’s use of the phrase “individual freedom” corresponds to the emphasis on individuality that is a hallmark of postidentity discourse. What she points to is minoritarian artists’ opinion that their uniqueness was based in their artistic skill and technique, and not in their membership in a particular cultural group. As a result, they felt they should be judged according to the same terms on which the larger pool of contemNikki S. Lee

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porary artists is evaluated. In other words, they wanted to be treated the same way that artists whose work was deemed to appeal universally were treated—without reference to and sensationalizing of their “otherness.” There is no disputing the fact that, in an ideal world, all artists would be assessed uniformly and on the same grounds. Also indisputable, however, is the degree to which postidentity ideology has seeped into, and the depth to which the privileges of whiteness frame, the art world: minoritarian artists are pleading for the privilege to be evaluated individually and to compete universally. On exhibit here is a blatant misrecognition of the exalted position that whiteness holds in the art world: white male artists have the privilege of never having their artistic productions interpreted and judged according to the artists’ identifications. Their work is deemed to be “universal” and to appeal “universally.” That minoritarian artists turn a blind eye to the sloping playing field of the art world and abide the notion of fairness with which meritocracy is invested demonstrates the degree to which whiteness has infiltrated and “possessed,” to riff on George Lipsitz’s phrase, the art world. The notions of artistic originality, individual merit, and white privilege have so thoroughly saturated the art world and market that individual minoritarian artists are willing to wager that they and their work are exceptional, the collective be damned. Their individual success or failure is their own, without any “handouts” or special assistance. Clearly, the individual-oriented rhetoric that is a keystone in postidentity and colorblind ideology has become part of these artists’ and the larger art world’s language and logic. Similarly, Golden’s insight that the “particular cultural specificity” of Freestyle artists “is marketed to the planet and sold back to them” is an astute if troubling observation that not only applies to other minoritarian artists but also indicates a linkage to postidentity ideology. It suggests the manner in which “light” versions of identifications are market driven: a new identity can be acquired more easily than ever before, just by purchasing a new set of clothes and makeup, getting a different hairstyle, procuring fresh music, and consuming the newest in popular culture. It indicates, at the same time, the level to which identification and difference have come to be regarded as mere flavors and accents, divorced from political affiliations and dissociated from social and economic conditions. Thus, while “post-black” hints at the larger intellectual discourse of postidentity that will become only more important as the millennium progresses, it reveals Golden’s marketing savvy: the exhibition was a sophis-

ticated effort to create a new brand identity for the “old-fashioned” cultural particularity that is blackness. And, that it overlaps with the regime change and resultant rebranding of the Studio Museum in Harlem—a culturally specific institution which had, in 1968, been created in a collaboration between African American artists and the Whitney Museum of American Art to showcase and foster contemporary art by artists of African descent—is not mere coincidence. Indeed, one year before Freestyle was mounted, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, having left the post of curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, assumed the directorship of the Studio Museum, and Golden, who had previously been at the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the Whitney Museum of American Art, became deputy director of exhibitions and programs. That Sims and Golden, two of the most prominent African American players in the art world, women who have made their careers without specializing in racially specific art, left posts at prestigious institutions that are generally thought of as culturally unspecific and universal in scope—though one could easily argue that they are in fact “white”—to join the culturally particularist Studio Museum was major news. In a New York Times article titled “Shaking Up a Harlem Museum: New Leaders Want New Definitions and Goals,” Holland Cotter announced the updates that Sims and Golden planned for the Studio Museum in Harlem. According to Cotter, the art-workers “from the very center of the art world” would redefine the museum in the same way that commercial investment, by the likes of the corporate powerhouses Starbucks and Old Navy, had reinvigorated 125th Street.20 Dr. Sims explains that the Studio Museum must change its collecting, programming, and exhibiting practices because mainstream museums have taken an interest in art by cultural “others.” Golden expands on that idea, noting that the museum must adapt to its ethnically, racially, and economically diverse surroundings and speak to the “Harlem community, the African-American community, the art community, the media community, [and] the international community.”21 The two also go on record with the evaluation that the term “African American artist” suffered from being overly “politicized,” that it needed to be broadened and globalized such that styles like abstraction would not be “disparaged in favor of more politically specific work.”22 In spite of their attempts to smooth down the rhetoric of change with reassurances that the museum will continue to focus on and support African American art and artists, the exhibition Freestyle, with its rebranding of blackness and Nikki S. Lee

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emphasis on the production of art-school-trained, “pacesetting” artists of African descent, in conjunction with the hiring of the “centrist” duo signaled a sea change not just for the Studio Museum. Sims and Golden put the larger art world, including artists, art-workers, and commercial and not-for-profit institutions, on notice: the art world has changed, and art that engages issues of identity would be regarded differently.23 The mainstream art world will be peopled by artists and artworkers whose training, studies, and professionalization are paramount. In other words, the particularist identifications of players will, according to postidentity ideology, be de-emphasized, and instead, emphasis will be placed on membership in the professional caste where individuals have access to education, economic resources, and social networks—all of which translates into privilege and power. Nikki S. Lee is exemplary of the professional class of artists created by the postidentity ideology. Her movement between groups and by-the-bootstraps success serves to underscore the diminished significance of minoritarian identifications and the politics associated with them.

Completing the Ethnographic Turn? A group of five people pose for the camera (plate 14). They stand on the porch of an old house, in front of an oversized American flag and framed on either side by attenuated wood columns. An attractive young Asian woman stands in the center with two men flanking her. The figures are dressed anachronistically, as each wears an outfit of vintage clothes. The female figure wears a 1940s-style red dress; her ensemble is completed by red lipstick and a red flower positioned behind her left ear. Three of her four male companions wear Panama straw hats and short sleeve tropicalprint shirts, while the fourth wears plaid pants and a white undershirt, or in common parlance “wife-beater.” Were it not for the time-stamp of “5-19-’99” and the bright colors of the image, viewers might be lulled into thinking the photograph dates to the 1940s, to a time when such bonhomie between Asian and Euro-Americans was complicated, to say the very least, by the world war being fought, in part, in the Pacific theater, the proliferation of commerce between American G.I.s and Asian sex-workers, and the internment of Japanese Americans whose national loyalty was questioned. In that anachronistic context, viewers would likely put two and two together to get five, assuming that

the female figure is Japanese American when, in fact, she is Korean. She is, of course, the artist Nikki S. Lee, and this image demonstrates her impressive ability to identify cultural groups that present complexly intersected identifications. In this instance, she engages a brand of historical reenactment that is favored by young hipsters in urban areas, individuals who have an attachment to swing music, swing dancing, and to the clothing of the so-called swing era. While these historical reenactors stand in opposition to civil war reenactors, who are oftentimes cast as disgruntled Confederacy-sympathizers, both groups are often peopled by European Americans who are nostalgic for a by-gone era. Interestingly, Lee’s title for this project, “Swingers,” does not allude to the race, ethnicity, nationality, class, or gender of the group’s members, but instead refers to the activity that unites them. Yet, perhaps without intending, the artist locks onto or into a culture in which issues of national, ethnic, race, gender, and class identities coalesce in complicated ways, evidenced in the selfconsciousness with which the swingers perform outmoded ways of being by adopting visual markers, such as Old Glory, which signals ecstatic and righteous patriotism, and clothes that indicate trenchant gender roles. Similar evidence of Lee’s enhanced ability to observe distinctive cultural groups is on display in image five of The Yuppie Project (plate 15). Here, the artist, again wearing red, snuggles into the chest of an unidentified man. She angles her head toward his shoulder, as he grasps her in an affectionate and protective embrace. More than other images from the Projects series, this photograph reads as tightly scripted. The mise-en-scène is a cozy, candlelit restaurant, and half-eaten dessert remains on the table. The snap-shooter angles the camera downward onto the subjects, resulting in a rather extreme upward-tilting background. The raking angle serves to highlight the objects in the foreground—including spoon, turquoise blue Tiffany and Company jewelry box, and glass vase with single pink rose— which are positioned in such a way that they direct viewers’ attention up to the faces of the embracing couple. In keeping with the definition of the acronym, Lee and her companion are presented as young urban professionals. Rather than wearing specialoccasion or casual clothing, each is dressed in a professional manner: he sports a shirt and tie and hangs his suit jacket on the back of his chair, and she wears a modest smock that reveals little of her body. The way they carry and pose themselves is stiff and awkward, as though they are about business and not pleasure. They do not smile or express physical enjoyment Nikki S. Lee

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in their circumstance, instead they carry themselves as though they are completing tasks on a list: romantic dinner, check, exchange gift of expensive jewelry, check, record occasion, check. The signs they manipulate communicate affluence, access, decorum, and professional success. While Lee’s title suggests that the group’s identification is based solely in the pursuit of economic mobility in an urban context, other, hidden identificatory positions, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, are tied to the culture of young white urban professionals. Notice, for instance, that the word “buppie” was created to describe a class of black urban professionals whose presence is excluded from the above term; wealth and elevated class position are not the great equalizers after all. Lee’s aptitude for recognizing cultural groups whose members provide opportunities to consider the ways intersecting identifications affect one another begs a consideration of her practice in relation to those of ethnographers and anthropologists, experts who study and analyze, oftentimes in the role of participant-observer, human organization, culture, and activity. One might even argue that the artist’s work illustrates an approach to the politics of identity that James Clifford recommends in his essay “Taking Identity Politics Seriously” (2000).24 In that article, the eminent cultural historian and major participant in the rethinking of the ethnographic and anthropological enterprise cautions against throwing out the baby with the bathwater in relation to the politics of identity. He argues that identity-based movements and politics remain deeply relevant. Clifford acknowledges criticism of the politics of identity from the right and left—as unpatriotic divisiveness, on the one hand, and as essentialist fragmentation of resistance movements that puts political policy and action on the back burner to cultural politics, on the other—while, at the same time, wondering whether such critiques mask, what George Lipsitz calls, a possessive investment in whiteness and its attendant privileges.25 Citing the work of Craig Calhoun, he suggests that identifications and identity-based politics are ever-changing, dynamic structures that encourage individuals to live up to higher moral and ethical principles to which they might not feel compelled to strive under different circumstances. Looking to both Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci, the author makes a case for the continued importance of the politics of identity, pointing out that humans become agents only after they position themselves within historical, social, and political matrices and that cultural politics, and not just material and social policy, give humans agency.

An engaged ethnography that attends to how identifications are being actively negotiated and studies how identity-based movements are affecting political and social policy is, according to Clifford, a major way to reenergize the politics of identity. He also recommends paying attention to the ways in which such negotiations and policies are being received and consumed by group insiders and outsiders. Lee’s Projects appears to offer such opportunities. Focusing on small worlds, within the larger world, that are governed by their own sets of behavioral and visual conventions, the photographs purport to show group members communicating among and performing for themselves. Yet, the identifications portrayed in the photographs are freed from any social, political, and historical positioning that might lead them to political or social action. Shown in moments of leisure and recreation, which may be community building but are not necessarily political actions, group members are represented as though they are participating in the branding, marketing, and consumption of their culture. In reality, the Projects photographs offer up identifications as hollow emblems. They embody the postmodern notion of the commoditized identity wherein tradition is one among many attributes used to gain cultural capital and lure economic investment. Indeed, Lee’s Projects reinforces poststructuralist ideas of identity-formation as merely socially constructed, which then leads to the understanding that identification is merely a matter of choice. In fact, identity is also formed through a complex mixture of shared historic experiences, social proscription, and political motivations. In other words, Lee’s Projects threatens to erase the substance around which identifications are based. In her article “Experience vs. Interpretation,” Miwon Kwon takes up the definition of ethnography—“diverse ways of thinking and writing about culture from a standpoint of participant observation”—offered by Clifford in The Predicament of Culture and considers it in relation to Lee’s Projects series.26 The art historian is interested in how artists, such as Lee, reconcile “the dialectical coupling of experience and interpretation” that has, until recently, defined ethnographic practice.27 Her particular concern is with how the critique of ethnographic authority has led to the problematic blurring of the boundaries between experience and interpretation that leads to an “overevaluation of ‘personal experience’ as the basis of true and reliable knowledge about culture and the self.”28 She is critical of the way in which subjective determinations and feelings come to carry great weight in Lee’s Nikki S. Lee

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work because, in Kwon’s opinion, it glosses over the fact that experience is always mediated by culture and history. While Kwon grants that Lee’s “‘going native’” performances, in which she takes on the signifiers of particular identifications, suggest that the artist can “pass” as belonging to the group, she is at odds with other critics’ assessments that the work questions stereotypes and participates in recent theorizations of identity.29 In the author’s estimation, Lee’s Projects not only reduces subcultures to a set of stylish scenes and identitynegotiations to a series of outfits but also, and more importantly, rejects the “other” while holding up herself. Kwon suggests that the critical embrace of Lee’s work is based in the (over)valuing of the reality and authenticity of the “other,” on the part of some members of the art world. She asserts that the apparently unstaged, spur-of-the-moment quality of the photographs intensifies the perception that Lee has established a rapport with group members while at the same time eliding the artist’s role as artistic mastermind and director. Projects reinforces “the tried and true technique of modern ethnographic authority—‘you are there . . . because I was there’.”30 The overvaluing of subjective experience in Lee’s ethnography-oriented work is Kwon’s focus, but toward the close of her essay, she also registers criticism regarding the effect the artist’s own membership in a cultural and ethnic group has on the critical reception of her art. Particularly dismaying for the author is, what she perceives to be, the artist’s duplicitous participation in a primitivist exoticism of herself and her subjects: “Rather than disturbing or complicating the voyeuristic desire and primitivist expectations that fuel ethnography and tourism, Lee fulfils them by objectifying herself, collapsing herself into the other as an other, [and] serving happily as a ‘native’ tour guide.”31 Kwon contends that, because of Lee’s Korean nationality, the art community accords her greater authority to portray the authenticity of the groups she temporarily joins than it would an artist who is not affiliated with such a minoritarian group. The author is critical of the assumption that the artist can portray “others” in a realistic and genuine way because she too is “other.”32 Hal Foster takes up the problematic of ethnographic authority granted to the cultural, especially racial and ethnic, “other” in a sustained way in his essay “The Artist as Ethnographer.”33 Particularly challenging for him is the aura of realism, reality, and authenticity that such artists are assigned due to the perception that they have “special access to primary psychic

and social processes from which the white subject is somehow blocked—a fantasy that is . . . fundamental to primitivist modernism.”34 He cautions against equations that accord “outsideness” to “difference” and “otherness,” warning that they are based in an essentialism that maintains the oldfashioned pattern wherein the self/same remains the central subject and the “other” continues as a marginalized and disempowered antisubject.35 In his opinion, the continued “othering” of the “other” in relation to the self/same leads to a series of displacements in which new subjects are constantly replaced by newer subjects, which results in both sets of subjects being consumed and dismissed before winning significant political gains. The consumption of new “others,” combined with the limited subjectivity they garner, Foster argues, buttresses “the self through romantic opposition, conserves the self through dialectical appropriation, extends the self through surrealist exploration,” and “prolongs the self through poststructuralist troubling” which not only leads to “self-absorption” and “narcissistic self-refurbishing” but also masks a lack of commitment to disturb the traditional hierarchy of subject positions.36 Foster contends that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many contemporary artists turn to ethnographic and anthropological methods because their works’ focus on the “other” appears political but, in fact, is not. Such ethnographically and anthropologically oriented practices do not question the artist’s authority as much as they reinforce it at the same time that they demonstrate a narrow engagement with the group studied. To artists working in the ethnographic vein, Foster suggests that they adopt a self-reflexivity that “attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.”37 That Lee engages aspects of ethnographic and anthropological methods in the Project series is obvious; what is less clear, however, is whether she follows Foster’s prescriptions: does she place herself and her practices within a critical framework, does her practice subvert or reinforce the outsider status of her subjects, and do the projects share authority or maintain a one-sided flow? And, what role do Lee’s ethnic, national, racial, sexual, class, and gender positionalities play in those dynamics? Some critics suggest that, in Projects, Lee is engaged in modified participant-observation in the ethnographic and anthropological sense and that she opens a window onto the reality of the cultural groups that she temporarily joins. The intellectual historian Louis Kaplan describes the series as “visual sociological experiments,” while the performance histoNikki S. Lee

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rian Rose Lee Goldberg writes, “Rather than creating from scratch a stylized figure from movie fiction . . . Lee’s starting point was a real community whom she would observe for three to four months in order to learn their gestures and dress, and to grow into the persona of a fabricated member of their group.”38 Russell Ferguson puts Lee’s practice in similar terms, writing that her “process can be compared to that of a participant observer or of a dedicated method actor in preparation for a role.”39 Author Guy Trebay employs a different, more physically based metaphor, asserting that the artist “experimentally drifts into other people’s lives and slips on their skins.”40 The realism on which the above critics comment is due, in part, to the perception that Lee activates the visual signs of particular cultural groups in ways that art-viewing audiences read as accurate and appropriate. For example, Goldberg applauds the artist on the “faultless realism in her dress and manners” and suggests that the realism derives from the artist’s construction of her temporary personae through incorporation, understanding, and experiencing the ordinariness of the everyday life of the adopted communities.41 Likewise, Ferguson remarks on the difficulty in locating Lee in her pictures because the depicted relationships are portrayed as “completely unaffected,” “what we see . . . is group after group of people who give every indication that Lee is a longtime friend around whom they feel relaxed and comfortable.”42 Ferguson notes that the “capacity to cathect cannot be put on like a costume” and determines the emotions she expresses to be “unfeigned.”43 The realism they identify depends on the photographic images that Lee displays to represent her performative experiences. As the only “documentation” of the artist’s extended stays within cultural groups, the photographs shape how her time or, more precisely, her performances are understood and perceived by audiences. The photographs enable Ferguson to conclude that Lee’s “own mutating presence in series after series does, in the end, succeed in disrupting any possible confidence in social classification systems of whatever kind. They are all permeable.”44 Similarly, the images lead Maurice Berger to interpret Lee’s Yuppie Project as a sophisticated visual analysis of the racial category whiteness because they make manifest the Wall Street professionals’ behavior, body language, and clothing which, in his estimation, communicate the affluence, exclusivity, and assuredness that attends whiteness. He goes so far as to applaud the pictures for their “raw, uncanny ability to represent the complexity and flu-

idity of human identity.”45 According to curator Gilbert Vicario, Lee’s work is effective because it shows how photographs “can persuade you into believing something that may or may not be true.”46 Ferguson, Berger, and Vicario suggest that the photographs present Lee’s practice as informed and knowing, for they seem to frame the artist and the “other” in a way that reads as critically engaged. Lee’s images function thusly because they draw on the visual language and history of documentary photography. While pinpointing its precise beginning is difficult, social documentary photography, the tradition Lee’s photographs most closely resemble, is probably based in the practices of figures such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, early twentieth-century social activists whose concern for the poor conditions of child-workers, immigrants, and the working classes among others led them to pick up cameras and make photographic illustrations. For Riis, Hine, and other social documentary photographers, the camera was the perfect instrument and photography the perfect technology to lobby for social change. Because the camera is a mechanical apparatus that records what is put in front of it and photography is a chemical process, they were deemed to fabricate products that were truthful, realistic, and objective. That social documentary photographs were “straight,” meaning they had not been manipulated or cropped in the darkroom setting, further solidified the aura of veracity with which they were endowed. The truth-quotient of social documentary photography has been undermined over the last few decades, most notably by the realization that the camera’s operator always has an agenda and that sociopolitical ideology is always embedded in her images. Documentary photographs are now recognized as both highly mediated and managed objects whose “authenticity” and “realism” are to be taken with a grain of salt. Two of documentary photography’s best-known offshoots are street and snapshot photography, both of which Lee’s images play off.47 Street photographs, or images of quotidian events and everyday people captured in public spaces, are defined by the sense of candidness and instantaneousness they convey. Whether the photographer is nearby or at a distance, she aims to make herself invisible to the degree that she can catch her subject unawares, fully absorbed in the activity in which she is engaged. Street photographers seek to reveal a distinctive pattern, movement, or moment that can, ostensibly, be captured only by the time-stoppage that photography allows. Because they are shot in a style that appears urgent and uncomposed, street photographs are deemed “authentic” and “real,” Nikki S. Lee

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for they uncover the previously hidden. Snapshots are cousins to street photographs. Photohistorian Sarah Greenough defines snapshots as “casually made, usually by untrained photographers, and intended to function as documents of personal history.”48 The term “snapshot” derives from hunting parlance which is apropos considering that many snapshot photographs are characterized by the feeling of immediacy they often express.49 They impart such feelings because their makers are mostly unschooled in “correct” and “appropriate” photographic techniques. The snapshooter’s untrained style—which can result in her shadow creeping into the image, blurred figures, and unnaturally tilting horizon-lines, among other “mistakes”—in turn lends her pictures an air of chance and unscriptedness that photographic critics, historians, and artists admire. Accordingly, snapshots are oftentimes regarded with a primitivist exoticism that casts them as more “authentic,” “real,” and thus powerful than images created by artphotographers. The documentary tradition and documentary photography appealed greatly to many first-generation conceptual artists. Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75), which of all conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s probably follows social documentary conventions most strictly, strikes a deep blow to the tradition with its interrogation of the principles of objectivity and realism on which it is ostensibly based. Most conceptualists did not set out to overthrow the documentary tradition, however. Some were drawn to the flat-footed artlessness with which snapshots are endowed. One need only look to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and Robert Morris’s Card File (1963) to recall conceptual artists’ devotion to, and parody of, deadpan photographic styles, graphs, and descriptive and diaristic writings among other documentary-style records of their ideas and actions. Others valued the agitated urgency with which street photographs are characterized. Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) and Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being: Getting Back (1975) (figures 2a–e), which feature respectively images of Acconci following random people on the street and Piper (fake) mugging someone in a public park, demonstrate the conceptualists’ interest in street photography. The reliance on such documentary-style remainders is evidence of conceptual artists’ prioritization of the idea behind, and actions involved in, the making of an object over its final or physical form. But, as Lucy Lippard outlines in “Escape Attempts,” conceptual art, in the forms it took in the 1960s and 1970s, was politically motivated, even if not always politi-

cally active, and one of its main concerns was the subversion of the gallerymuseum system. Artists attacked the system by employing appropriative strategies, producing ephemera, and launching performative actions, and information, communication, and distribution were highly valued. These tactics, including those borrowed from the documentary tradition, were thought to undermine the perpetuation of the commodity-status of artworks and the cult of artistic originality on which it is based. Lee and other contemporary artists are also drawn to the documentary photographic tradition.50 It should come as no surprise that Lee’s photographic images call up the realism and straightforwardness associated with the document, especially considering that the artist defines herself as a conceptualist or conceptual artist.51 Lee’s act of self-naming functions in multiple ways—it’s more than just a self-conscious aligning of her practice with a strain of artistic production that is prized for both its intellectual acumen and bad-boy attitude toward the art world. Calling herself a “conceptualist” puts a stake in the ground, expressing the artist’s prioritization of the ideas behind her work over the end-products. That the end-products are photographic snapshots taken not by the artist but by passersby who are untrained in photographic and artistic techniques can be interpreted as evidence of Lee’s adherence to the dematerialization project and the de-skilling of the agent-artist, and of her reliance on chance-operations. Indeed, one might interpret the prominence of photographs-as-documentation in the Projects as an emphasis on the performative and experiential aspects of the series. Yet, Lee’s use of photographs, understanding of the documentary aspects of photography, and relationship to performance-actions are distinct from those of conceptualists. Most conceptualists approached the document with a certain flatfootedness that suggests they invested some faith in it, which is certainly one factor that led Benjamin Buchloh to conclude that they colluded, perhaps unwittingly, with the very institutions they sought to critique.52 Still, for first-generation conceptualists, the document was not prioritized over the actions or processes they recorded. In the case of Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being: Getting Back, for example, the action of (fake) mugging someone takes precedence over the images that record the performance. Yet, that prioritization does not diminish the centrality of the photographic remainder to Piper’s performance, or, perhaps more importantly, to later studies of the project, such as this one. Moreover, in spite of their inability Nikki S. Lee

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to account for how collected their dematerialized objects would become as well as for the hallowed positions they would come to enjoy in the art world and history, first-generation conceptualists used documents in an earnest attempt to circumvent the gallery-museum system. By contrast, Lee approaches both the document and documentary photography with a wink and nod, suggesting to her audience that it’s all fiction and no substance. In that respect, her use of documentaryphotography conventions is akin to that of Eleanor Antin’s whose selfdesignation as “postconceptualist” signals a critical distance from documentary traditions. If the success of each project is judged by the artist’s ability to “obtain photographs that are convincing works of art” because she has been “accepted by the chosen group to the extent that . . . spontaneous, informal photographs become possible,” then it becomes clear that Lee not only ranks the “documentary” remains above her experiential performances but also that she devalues the aesthetic significance of the performative actions to the projects.53 Furthermore, that the artist is an art-world darling who received institutional funding to produce The Hip Hop Project and whose work, in ten short years of being exhibited, has been collected and shown at important venues, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, suggests little or no critical distance from the gallery-museum complex.54 The appellation “postconceptualist” is, perhaps, more appropriate to the artist’s practice then. Such an emphasis on the end-product rather than on process and experience undermines the claims to ethnography that her work portends and, more importantly, shifts the balance of power and authority in Lee’s favor. For instance, while Lee desires that the photographs possess a raw “artlessness” that “will register as ‘real’ for viewers,” she also produces a checklist of scenes she wants to depict.55 Moreover, in addition to controlling how she appears, she chooses when photographs will be taken and, perhaps more significantly, which are suitable for display in exhibitions. Thus, though some element of chance enters the equation because the artist leaves camera operation to group members, the photographed situations and settings are prescribed and circumscribed by the artist. What is more, Lee controls the manner in which group members and their culture are perceived in addition to how she and her experiences are represented. While the Projects images hover between being professional and amateur, composed and spur-of-the-moment, they do not demonstrate

shared ethnographic power so much as they shore up Lee’s autonomy and challenge her subjects’ agency.

To Be or Not to Be “Other” Apropos to the rhetoric of postidentity, Lee’s Projects seems to support the postidentity claim that race and ethnicity are no longer factors that affect social, material, economic, and political circumstances and to demonstrate that identification is individually determined, culturally and socially constructed, and, above all, not political. Evidence that others share these sentiments is apparent in Jennifer Dalton’s statement that Lee “visually blends into divergent subcultures,” pointing up “the constructed nature of identity to amusing, as well as sober, effect.”56 The author is impressed with the “fresh and energetic spirit” that the artist brings to, what she describes as, an “often deadly serious debate over assimilation and ‘passing’.”57 For Dalton, Lee’s work suggests that social identity has “at least as much to do with conscious choices about clothing and hairstyle as with facial features and skin color.”58 Dalton’s sometimes-condescending statements imply two things about Lee’s images: first, they suggest that, in the past when identity mattered, identity was a question of physiognomy rather than a product of the material conditions of the prioritization of certain physiognomic traits over others. Second, that the time for treating identity with gravity and seriousness has been replaced by an approach that favors bouncy freshness. Similarly, that “it can be difficult at first to distinguish Lee from the other people in the picture” and that Lee’s “relationships” to “the others” appear “completely unaffected” seems to indicate, to curator Russell Ferguson, that the artist has ushered in a novel way of navigating identity.59 Lee has, in his words, an “implacable confidence in her own ability to find emotional common ground with virtually anyone.”60 These statements hint at how Lee’s work is used to show that politics has been removed from matters of identification and that identity is mostly a personal choice based on affinity. Evidence of the affinity-based, depoliticized model of identity can be located in any number of Lee’s photographs. In one image from The Hip Hop Project (plate 16), for instance, the artist seems to walk in stride with her companions. Her black blouse, with its cleavage-revealing neckline, glistening chain-link belt, and silky head-cover are in keeping with her cohorts’ ensembles. Likewise, she seems to take behavioral cues from the Nikki S. Lee

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only other woman in the frame. Lee raises her large-framed sunglasses in a casually seductive way—a variation on the gesture of the female figure to her left, who, in spite of the fact that it is night, wears dark-lens glasses over which she peers suggestively. While her counterpart sits on her companions’ lap, the artist kneels between hip-hop artist Prodigy’s legs, leaning her back against his chest and resting her arms on the tops of his thighs.61 This photograph demands a bit of attention not just because of the untrained quality it displays—notice, for instance, the figure who is cropped out of the left side of the frame and the glaring hotspots on Lee’s left cheek, her male companion’s knees, and the left collarbone of her female counterpart created from the camera’s harsh flash—but also for the simple fact that the skin tones of all of the figures appear to be within range. This is remarkable because it is evidence that Lee, whose complexion is naturally fairly light, underwent a procedure—whether “sunning” in a tanning bed or applying makeup or chemicals that temporarily darkened her skin—that altered her skin color so that it matches those of her companions. Ironically, Lee’s cosmetic efforts to integrate the group and emphasize similarity do just the opposite: they open a Pandora’s box of difference regarding class and ethnic hierarchies within Asian groups, class discrepancies in Asian American and Asian immigrant populations in the United States, the marginalized positions occupied by both Asian Americans and African Americans in American society, the problematics of “blacking up” and other race changes, and the relationship between Asian Americans and African Americans. Beginning in the 1960s, efforts to gather Americans of Asian descent for political mobilization and against systematic discrimination led to the replacement of the Eurocentric term “Oriental” with the phrases “Asian” and “Asian American,” phrases which are more specific than the former but still produce a homogenizing effect wherein people with vastly disparate cultural practices, languages, ethnicities, class positions, and nationalities are lumped together in oftentimes uncomfortable ways. Indeed, within contemporary Asian nation-states, there are indigenous and nonindigenous individuals and hierarchies based on skin color, national origins, and geopolitical aggression, and those same divisions exist between Asian nations. Divisive beliefs and practices travel with immigrants and shape their interactions and experiences in their adoptive countries. Even in the context of the United States, where efforts to gather various Asians

around an Asian American identification have resulted in political gains, in-group and extra-group partitions based in class and skin-color hierarchies, among other differences, continue to be maintained at the same time that settlement patterns and national and cultural assimilation have led some immigrant groups to buy into the preexisting racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies of their adoptive country. While class position and wealth certainly pad the landing of some Asian immigrants, the cultural, national, ethnic, and racial differences of Asian immigrants have historically rendered them “other” to the white American majority and thus positioned them in the margins. Asian immigrants to the United States and Asian Americans have experienced and continue to endure disenfranchisement, suppression, and discrimination. Power operates in insidious but nonetheless substantial ways, so it should come as no surprise that iconographic narratives designed to suppress minoritized groups also function to foment distrust and aggression between them. The assignment of the moniker “model minority” to Asian Americans and Asian immigrants, for example, lauds some individuals, who are oftentimes lighter skinned and higher classed, for their apparent assimilation into, and adoption of, American culture and ideology while excluding others, who are oftentimes darker skinned and lower classed. “Model minority” also places people into a homogenizing straightjacket that limits subjectivity while, at the same time, fostering resentment among other minoritarian groups who are cast as unabsorbable. That Asian Americans and African Americans have experienced similar discrimination and suppression, been cast as flipsides of the same stereotypical coin—“model minority” and flawed minority—and endured similar derision in popular culture in the form of yellowface and blackface led, in the 1960s, to a political meeting of minds wherein Asian American and African Americans collaborated to create the militant liberation organizations Yellow Panthers and Black Panthers. Substantial cultural crosspollination continues to take place. Young Asian Americans are prime consumers and distributors of hip-hop culture due, in some cases, to the proximity of their neighborhoods to African American ones, and, more generally, to the mass-marketing and distribution of hip-hop. African Americans, too, have been avid consumers of Asian culture, especially martial arts culture. Indeed, within the space of seven years, Afro-Asian exchange has been a prime location of popular interest and academic study, manifest in the popularity of Afro-Asian celebrities such as Tiger Woods Nikki S. Lee

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and Kimora Lee Simmons, the rise of the hip-hop ensemble Wu Tang Clan, the release of the movie Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai in 1999, the publication of the novel Tuff in 2000, the mounting of the exhibition Black Belt at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, and the publication of AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics in 2006.62 Lee’s Hip Hop Project taps into these various histories and dynamics in ways that are not always straightforward. That Lee performs as “other” is clear, but which “other” she steps into is anything but. Likely, viewers will interpret the artist’s impossibly dark-toned skin, makeup, clothes, and demeanor as an example of her “trying to be black.” To be sure, an assessment that the artist, in her darking up, participates in the blackface tradition is not off base. An equally appropriate evaluation is that Lee performs an instantiation of a particular urban phenomenon, the Asian American, perhaps Vietnamese American or Filipino American, who is acculturated African American. In other words, the artist, in her performance of urban Asian-Americanness, employs yellowface to become another “other.” The yellowface tradition, begun in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present, is a cross-racial performance in which a performer, who is usually white, masquerades as East Asian by “yellowing” her skin, affecting the epicanthic fold of Asian eyes through makeup or prostheses, wearing a wig of straight black hair, donning stereotypical dress, and talking with an exaggerated accent.63 That the artist invokes yellowface is apparent not just in her exaggeratedly dark-toned skin but also in her eye makeup. The thickly drawn-on eyeliner extends past the outside corners of her eyes in an “Orientalist” flourish, an affect commonly used to emphasize an almondshaped eye or approximate an epicanthic fold. In effect, Lee doubles up her Asianness by wearing her eye makeup in this style. Her engagement of the equally troubling practices of yellowface and blackface could be chalked up to benign ignorance on the part of the Korean immigrant, but it also suggests that the artist occupies a privileged position within ethnic, national, and class hierarchies. In spite of the fact that her art is used to service postidentity rhetoric, Lee’s difference is not lost on critics. In fact, they rarely resist commenting on it. Speaking about the artist’s “capacity for empathy,” Ferguson marvels that she can “transcend” “insuperable obstacles, such as, for example, her pronounced Korean accent.”64 Fashion and design journalist Guy Trebay writes, “Certain immutable elements of Lee’s own reality affected her masquerade, foremost among them physiognomy and race.”65 He expects that

viewers will find a disjuncture between Lee and her surroundings and, as a result, ask themselves “what’s wrong with this picture?”66 Continuing his musings on viewers’ reactions, he imagines they would question “how . . . that pretty young Asian woman in a tube top end[ed] up sitting alongside a grizzled Jethro Bodine type with a Confederate flag on the wall behind him and a shotgun across his lap?”67 Writing in KoreAm Journal, Paul Lee Cannon explains that Lee’s work takes “her to places most KAs [Korean Americans] have not been.”68 To prove his point, he cites a photograph from The Ohio Project: “Lee lounges in full-on trailer-trash glory, replete with rickety mobile home backdrop and peroxide-blond coif next to her bare-chested hick boyfriend.”69 It is no coincidence that Cannon and Trebay use images from The Ohio Project to make their cases, for a whole host of cultural clashes give these images considerable power. One particularly poignant photograph (figure 29) features Lee resting on the right arm of a recliner in which sits a man. He wears a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and tall boots that lace up to the middle of his shins. She wears a white tube top that is bordered by a pink fabric that matches her shorts. He holds a rifle, resting its butt on his left leg and angling the muzzle on the top of her left thigh. That their ethnic and racial backgrounds are different is certainly worth mentioning, but the photograph contains a number of jarring discrepancies that, one could argue, pack an even greater punch. Notice the contrast between the daintiness of the floral wallpaper, satin window valance, and mauve placemats covering the surface of the end table and the masculine swagger of the long-nose gun, an object which seems to indicate conquered territory. Observe the disparity between the defiance signaled by the Confederate flag and the firearm and the domesticity of the hand-crocheted blanket draped over the seat. The dissimilarity in the figures’ expressions is perhaps most striking: she looks directly into the lens in a straightforward but not confrontational posture, while he glances furtively and covetously at her lap on which he rests the firearm-phallus. Exploring the political vicissitudes of differences does not drive Lee’s work; rather the three reasons the artist cites for embarking on Projects correspond with postidentity’s twin ideologies of individual agency and social determinism. The first relates to Walt Whitman’s famous verse, “I contain multitudes.” Lee explains: “I always feel like I have a lot of different characters inside and I was curious to understand these things. I wanted to see some sort of evidence that I could be all those different things.”70 The Nikki S. Lee

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29 Nikki S. Lee, The Ohio Project (7), 1999, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

second concerns the gap between how she thinks about herself and how people think about her.71 The third has to do with her exploration of how environmental determinants, including sociocultural and audience contexts, affect her own and others’ senses of self: “Other people make me a certain kind of person. It’s about inner relationships and how those really address the idea of identity.”72 She declares an interest in showing audiences the range of personae they inhabit: “There is the persona you present to a schoolteacher or to your parents or to a new boyfriend. Each is affected by the context and each shows a gap between inside and outside. Each is a personal performance.”73 The artist’s statements seem to demonstrate a strong allegiance to the idea that identity is socially, culturally, and performatively constructed, a series of causes and effects in which “someone else’s identity affects” hers.74 In the hypothetical scenario Lee sets up, factors that affect identity have rather superficial outcomes, yet her difference continues to be a subject of commentary for the artist and her critics. That Lee and her Projects series can be freighted with such seemingly contradictory interpretations and ideologies is worth exploring because it points to a certain identity-based exceptionalism that flies in the face of the postidentity, colorblind rhetoric for which her work is often used to service. In a telling and perhaps preemptive move, Lee is the first to cite and evaluate the manner in which difference functions in her practice. Sometimes, the artist points to her own, special individuality as important to her ability to assimilate into various groups and incorporate new identitybased behaviors: “I basically think I understand human beings, their similarities and differences.”75 “I have good instincts when it comes to different lifestyles,” she explains.76 She does not require studying because, as she says, “simply, I have talent,” and I “just know their [her subjects’] emotions.”77 These expressions of confidence and conviction lay bare a healthy sense of self-reliance and certainty. On the one hand, the artist’s assertion of her agency to determine her own identity can be understood as a positive manifestation of the politics of identity. On the other, Lee’s belief in her own exceptionalism and prioritization of individual-oriented identityformation can be interpreted as evidence of a rugged and stubborn individualism that is a prominent aspect of postidentity and colorblind rhetorics which see difference as mere flavor. While Lee’s actions can be read as supporting competing discourses, they are better understood as a meta-

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commentary on the contradictions inherent to racialization and identification, for she deploys her various identifications knowingly. More often, however, Lee cites her Korean nationality and membership in the Asian “race” as the rationale behind her possession of strong assimilative abilities. She claims, for instance, that “in Asian culture, we are taught to empathize with people. We don’t respond to people in a rational or analytic manner.”78 She also ascribes a certain monolithic and totalitarian quality to Asian culture, “You must act in a certain way, because it is a tacit language that is grasped by everyone. That’s how we read each other, on an emotional state, which makes us a highly sentimental and emotional people.”79 According to Lee, Asian cultural norms do not call for applying pop psychology to “explain emotions or behavior through situations— ‘Oh, this person may be experiencing a particular situation, that’s why she acts this way’.”80 Rather, “to understand another person,” she explains, “I first have to synchronize my emotions to that person’s emotions.”81 In her estimation then, her empathy is “very Oriental”—an evaluation that she would likely extend to her work as well.82 Similarly, Lee is not above taking advantage of her status as a Korean in America. Indeed, her position as an expatriate seems to give her license to compare her own national and ethnic cultures to those of the United States. Of the two, she comments, “Western culture is very much about the individual, while Eastern culture is more about identity in the context of society. You simply cannot think of yourself out of context.”83 She states it differently in another interview: “In Western culture, identity is about ‘me’. In Eastern culture, the identity is ‘we’. Identity is awareness of others.”84 Those evaluations indicate that the artist’s membership in Korean culture in particular and Asian culture in general authorizes her to make blanket remarks that raise the specter of stereotype. While one could argue that such a brand-oriented use of one’s cultural affiliation is well within the purview of the politics of identity, one could just as easily reason that it portends a conceptualization of identity as something shallow that is a hallmark of postidentity discourse. Still, Lee appears to operate under the assumption that gender and sexuality work in concert with ethnicity, race, and nationality to increase her ability to incorporate other identities and take on new identitybased behaviors. For example, the artist readily admits that she “take[s] advantage of being a little Korean woman, little Korean girl,” to get people, especially men, to help her learn behaviors associated with par-

ticular identity-groups.85 Regarding the training she received from her skateboarder-subjects during The Skateboarders Project, for instance, she confesses, “I’m a cute Asian girl, so guys want to help me.”86 Sometimes she makes boyfriends or, in the case of The Lesbian Project, a girlfriend, show her the ropes and teach her how to belong.87 While acknowledging that “a person’s identity can be very fluid from one relationship to the next,” Lee’s comments suggest that she is particularly concerned with how identity changes due to intimate connections.88 She continues, “I realize that my own identity changes depending on whom I’m going out with or who becomes my boyfriend. One person might make me feel very bossy and independent, another might make me feel really feminine and fragile.”89 Statements such as these, which can be interpreted as opportunistic and manipulative or as ironic and knowing, expose the paradoxes that undergird claims about identity and reveal the intelligence of the Projects. The artist’s judgment that “when you love somebody, you really want to understand that person and think about him or think like him” reveals a complicated mixture of sweet romanticism, potentially destructive selflessness, and desire to merge with the other. On the one hand, the heady rush of empathetic intimacy that Lee describes, of wanting to be so close to another person that one embodies her or his thoughts, feelings, and actions is a feeling with which many can identify. On the other hand, that the artist speaks of “boyfriends” and wanting to “think like him” not only buttresses her own sexual orientation but also suggests a troubling attachment to heteronormativity. Taken together, such statements indicate an antifeminist or, perhaps more appropriately, postfeminist stance that supports the notion that it is customary for a woman’s identity to be dictated by and always relative to the man with whom she is intimate while foreclosing the reality that other ways of relating exist. Postfeminism, an ideology that falls under the larger umbrella of postidentity, has, according to Elaine J. Hall and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez, been characterized in the popular media as a backlash against feminism by older women who are discouraged that gender parity has not been reached and by younger women to whom it is unnecessary in the current landscape.90 The authors explain that the popular media also reports a downright antifeminist stance in certain sectors of young women, women of color, and full-time homemakers as well as an increase in a “no-but . . .” attitude in which women disavow the label “feminist” but still “demand equal pay, economic independence, sexual freedom, and reproductive Nikki S. Lee

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choice.”91 In their book Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, editors Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra explain that postfeminist discourse revises, commodifies, and depoliticizes feminism at the same time that it hides its collusion with certain raced, classed, and aged positionalities.92 Central to postfeminism, they write, is “an affluent elite” that supports an “emphatic individualism” that confuses “self-interest with individuality and elevates consumption as a strategy for healing.”93 The postfeminist subject achieves within traditional frameworks, maintains her youthful appearance and outlook, and above all has considerable agency; she is evidence that feminism worked and demonstration that it is dead. In her description of how she puts her gender, ethnicity and race into service, Lee casts herself as a postfeminist, postracial subject. The various intersecting strands of her identifications are products she markets and commodities she exchanges to emphasize her individuality and increase her authority.

The Urge to Merge The longing to be one with the “other” that Lee expresses is akin to the liminal state of being subject and object simultaneously that Piper, Antin, and Smith undertake in their performances. Evident, too, is an eroticism surrounding the idea and action of such a merger that the other artists studied here also experience. Yet, Lee’s urge to fuse with another is also quite distinct from Piper’s, Antin’s, and Smith’s. Whereas the other artists express pleasure about their temporary, performative embodiments of the “other,” Lee’s articulations mostly concern an “other” with whom she is romantically and intimately involved and do not center around the “others” who happen to be members of the cultures with which she hangs out for months at a time. That exoticization suggests a shallow engagement with group members and a superficial awareness of their cultural practices which also implies a limited understanding of how identity and identifications function. The impression of a less-than-deep engagement with group or communal identification is not communicated in individual images as much as it is when looking at a number of images from various projects together. It is most visible during, what Jennifer Dalton calls, the “‘Where’s Waldo’” moments, when viewers are encouraged to play the game of “spotting Lee

and decoding her masquerade.”94 Take, for example, an image from The Hispanic Project (figure 30) in which the artist and a woman companion pose for the camera. The Latina smiles lightly as she strikes a casual but proud posture, pushing back her shoulders, thrusting her bare belly forward, and resting her weight on her rear leg. She is comfortable in the backyard surroundings. By contrast, the artist, who sits on a folding chair, slopes her shoulders forward and rounds her lower back in a gesture that reads as protective. Most striking is her gaze: an unsmiling Lee looks directly at the camera and seems to stare straight through it to (future) viewers. The gaze is also evident in a photograph from The Yuppie Project (figure 31) in which Lee appears with two professionals. The group of three ostensible colleagues sits in a New York City park with their lunches in their laps. The artist’s male companions flash slightly nervous grins toward the camera, while her own sight is set on something beyond the photographer and camera, to an imagined audience. Lee’s fixed gaze is likewise apparent in an image from The Skateboarders Project (2000) which pictures the artist standing with two cohorts. The male figures who, judging from the studio setting, skateboard samples, and mock ups, are board designers stand in front of their wares in a relaxed way. The figure to Lee’s immediate right folds his arms in a posture that suggests uneasiness, but he smiles broadly. The figure to his right takes a mischievous stance, smiling playfully and extending his arm beyond his friend to the area behind Lee’s head, where he has positioned his index and middle fingers into a “V.” Again, Lee stares unflinchingly outside the picture frame to a distant and idealized viewer. These instances of the artist’s looking audaciously outside the frame and moments of “find the artist” combine to contradict Ferguson’s claim that Lee’s “interest in herself is defined almost exclusively through her relationships with other people” and instead evince a centeredness on self that values individual identity over communal identity.95 For Ferguson, “the cumulative effect of Lee’s own mutating presence in series after series . . . disrupt[s] any possible confidence in social classification systems of whatever kind” and shows “they are all permeable.”96 But the artist’s “mutating presence” functions otherwise too. It highlights the enduring permanence of her difference from the “others” with whom she is pictured. To be sure, the fact of Lee’s difference has as much to do with her Asian physiognomy and intersecting identifications as with her gaze, which is too direct and insistent to be coincidental. The artist’s continued visual existence

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30 Nikki S. Lee, The Hispanic Project (20), 1998, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.



31 Nikki S. Lee, The Yuppie Project (15), 1998, Fujiflex print, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

acknowledges her self-sameness, her unchanging quality from photograph to photograph. Most importantly, Lee’s “changing same” presence asserts her authority. While it is difficult to discern whether the artist builds the “Where’s Waldo” moments into the images or viewers assign that meaning to the photographs, what is absolutely clear is that Lee anticipates that viewers will assign meaning to the Projects photographs as well as to her difference in relation to the images: “I don’t think about race or nationality. I don’t need to bring up that issue because other people will.”97 Journalist Trebay echoes that sentiment when he writes, “Lee can rely on the viewer to bring his own stereotypes to her work.”98 Tellingly, he and Cannon do just that when, in describing images from The Ohio Project, they characterize Lee’s companion as a “hick” in “full-on-trailer-trash-glory.”99 That characterization in combination with their description of the artist as a “KA” and “pretty young Asian woman” positions her as his polar opposite, as an urban hipster regardless of the “mobile home backdrop and peroxide blond coif.”100 It is the sum-total of their aggregated differences that signify most to Cannon, Trebay, and, arguably, Lee. In other words, just as the artist counts on viewers to approach the works with preconceptions, she also Nikki S. Lee

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employs iconographic narratives and signs that communicate specific, pre­ programmed information about the groups with which she travels. Ferguson notes as much, “She makes use of certain common stereotypes. Her various identities, although they are quite specific, are at the same time dependent on the recognizability of particular sub-cultures. The visual markers of the stereotype are the means by which each successive photograph is quickly identified as part of its respective series.”101 Despite her recognition that many aspects of her identity intersect to make her the person she is and the personae she becomes, there remains an unwillingness on Lee’s part to grapple with the consequences of her difference as well as with how difference affects the “others” with whom she temporarily associates. Indeed, it can be difficult to discern whether Lee’s reticence to come to terms with her difference is an act of political resistance, a form of naïveté that is a function of her immigrant status, or a complicated mixture of the two. Just when the artist’s testament that she has no “responsibility to put social issues in [her] art” and caginess about talking with scholars and critics about issues of race and ethnicity would have put such questions to rest, she seems to be revising her understanding of, and views on, difference and its effect on “minorities.”102 In a recent public discussion, Lee claims that, when she came to the United States, she had no knowledge about the “status of minorities” because there is “no difference in Korea.”103 She admits, however, that, after more than a decade living outside of Korea and in the United States, she has increased awareness of herself as a “minority.”104 In the American context, she is “a Korean woman with a big accent,” and in the Korean context, she is an “outsider” expatriate living in the United States.105

Conclusion Lee’s recent statement that she “never thought of herself as a minority, only as a majority” is revealing of the privileged position that she occupies in the Projects series.106 As Goldberg asserts, Lee “made her way into various crowds, where her presence in still photographs served to highlight the particularities of others. The corollary was that she found herself more truly amidst the anonymous line-up of the group portrait.”107 Indeed, “the particularities of others” is not the subject of the series. Projects does not explore the cultures and experiences of “others,” nor does it express politi-

cal and social empathy with the groups that are infiltrated. Rather Lee is Projects’ subject and object; she is the visible constant that can be found in all of the images, the authoritative tie that binds it together.108 That Lee is ever-present and never fully camouflaged by her assumed identity is in line with the works of the other artists studied in this book, yet because of the sheer number of temporary identifications that Lee adopts, her series is perhaps most akin to Smith’s. Notwithstanding the many personae with which Lee and Smith cloak themselves in their respective performances, both artists seem to preserve and even renew their influence and agency. Moreover, in their modeling of a liminal space where one can, at the very least appear to, be self and “other” simultaneously, Lee’s Projects is in keeping with Piper’s Mythic Being, Eleanor Antin’s Eleanora Antinova, and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles. The artist’s identity-switching performances portend the existence of a culture and society in the United States wherein difference does not divide, dissimilarities are leveled, and distinctions do not necessarily lead to disparity and entrenched hierarchies. Yet, the post-racial and postidentity discursive environment in which Lee produces is discrete from Piper’s, Antin’s, and Smith’s discursive milieus, for it is adamant that the dynamics governing how identity affects one’s material circumstances have shifted dramatically. Ironically, because Lee’s Projects emphasizes how dependent she is on the privilege her intersectional (national, ethnic, gender, racial, and sexual) identity provides, they contradict the very post-racial and postidentity ideology they are said to service. The artist’s intersectional identity in combination with her well-defined artistic authority accentuates the continued relevance of identity-positions and the importance of mobilizing action around them. Lee’s series, like Piper’s, Antin’s, and Smith’s performances, underscores the power of the artist to control her identifications through her art making—a dynamic that, in its subversion of persistent identity-based hierarchies, remains remarkable and significant. As is the case with the works of the other artists featured here, Lee’s Projects can be interpreted as supporting the politics of identity, yet it is perhaps more appropriate to understand them as testaments to the slippery ambivalence that defines racialization and identitymaking in the United States.

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Conclusion

T

he politicization of identifications and the articulation of identity as a platform from which to launch political, social, and artistic actions continue to be significant actions in spite of the heralding of the current moment as post-racial. The enacting of “others” as an exploration of how identity matters and the expression of individual agency persists as well. Indeed, one might argue that the politics of identity has returned with a vengeance. Its shape has shifted, but its core concern remains social, financial, and political empowerment through the use of the particularities of identity. For evidence of these phenomena at work, one need look only to the 2008 presidential campaign. On the Democratic side, the race was between two politically savvy, well-heeled, and connected competitors with educations from elite institutions: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. When the candidates Clinton and Obama hit the campaign trail, they did not dwell on the particularities of their identities; they focused instead on their prodigious experience. However, when attention was trained on the historic importance of the electoral race— for the first time in American history, there was a serious possibility that the nation’s leader would not be a moneyed white man with an exclusive education—the competition

came to be framed in terms of the specifics of the Democratic candidates’ identifications. That “historic” became an overused code word pointing to the candidates’ difference from what has, until recently, been presidentially normative highlights that they were distilled to their elemental components. As a result, the race became a battle between members of minoritarian groups that have, in the nation’s recent past, made compelling cases for their enfranchisement and against their systemic suppression. That the candidates’ personal biographies did not fit neatly or completely into the essentialist boxes set before them did not much matter. Candidates Clinton and Obama were obliged to enact “others”: they became “white woman” and “black man” and engaged in a bare knuckles brawl with their like-situated opponent.1 That the particularities of identity have considerable significance came up in discussions about voters’ choices as well. During the 2008 campaign season, much was made about the possibility that voters’ selections would be based on personal identifications with one or the other of the Democratic candidates and not on the pressing social, political, and financial issues of the day. Such a supposition underestimates the erudition of certain segments of the voting population and, at the same time, effaces the fact that white male voters have voted historically for candidates with whom they identify. In other words, American voters, regardless of racial, gender, class, and ethnic background, have for centuries sided with political candidates with whom they share or, more to the point, aspire to share power, ideals, and ethics. Indeed, Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate proves that the politics of identity is not dead but very much alive. Her nomination was a politically savvy, if not deeply skeptical, maneuver on the part of McCain and the Republican Party, for, in their efforts to reach a broad swath of their base, they lost sight of whether the governor’s professional experience qualified her to perform vice presidential, and perhaps presidential, duties. To be sure, conservatives were carried away by how many “quotas” Palin’s vicepresidential nomination could fill: she appealed to female voters because of her gender, conservative voters because of her politics, working-class voters because of her class identification, and voters on the religious right because of her religious affiliation, among others. Palin willingly played her part, acting out various “others”—politician, ferocious soccer mom, and victim of liberal patriarchy, among them—at campaign rallies and on talk

shows. Of course, the genius of the Palin nomination was that any criticism she encountered could be rebuffed with an accusation of discrimination, that is, she was unfairly scrutinized because of her—fill in the blank here—race, gender, class, religion. Republicans and conservatives appear committed to leveling the “identity politics” playing field with Democrats and liberals. The nomination of Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and African American, to head the Republican National Committee and the rise in importance of Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, the South Asian–American governor of Louisiana, in the Republican machine is evidence that the party is digesting the lessons of intersectionality: all individuals have multiple identifications simultaneously, that is, nonwhites, including African Americans and Asian Americans, can be just as fiscally, socially, and religiously conservative, educated, and moneyed as European Americans. The placement of Jindal, Palin, and Steele—individuals who, in spite of their conservative bona fides, are practiced at mobilizing and performing their particular identifications for sociopolitical gain—into prominent positions within the Republican party suggests that its leadership is not just coming to terms with, but attempting to take advantage of, the country’s changing ethnoracial landscape. Given the ubiquity of identity-performances in our current political, social, and economic environment, it should come as no surprise then that artworks, like Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s, in which artists take on the attributes of an “other” as an articulation of the politics of identity, abound. What is perhaps new is the manner in which younger artists and their critics engage straightforwardly with the discourse and its history in their works. Take, for example, Benjamin Genocchio’s New York Times review of an exhibition at the Jersey City Museum, in which the writer applauds a performance artist for working on issues of identity “despite the fact that identity politics in art has been out of fashion for a decade.”2 That the attributes of “identity politics” art have been codified is apparent in his description of the artist’s work: “angry,” “difficult,” and “uncomfortable.” Her art, he explains, “has something to say” about “being a Latina in the U.S.,” and, as a result, it is “not for everyone.”3 According to the writer, the artist’s work “challenges the way we look at the world, reminding us that how we see ourselves and others is bound up with an intricate mix of social and cultural mores.”4 Genocchio’s matter-of-fact claim that “identity politics” art has been dead for a decade and troubling use of “us,” “we,” “ourConclusion

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selves,” and “others” without qualifying to whom those words refer should raise readers’ red flags.5 Even more troubling is his characterization of the work as mere “identity politics,” for the exhibition continues the project of interrogating the limits of individual and communal identity, exploring the making of identity, and negotiating the boundaries between self and other that Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith began in the performances studied here. Lost on Genocchio is the sophistication with which the younger generation’s performances of alternate identities shapes and is shaped by the politics of identity. The work of artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, whose exhibition Ask Chuleta: Contemporary Art is the subject of Genocchio’s review, is proof that younger artists are keeping pace with the shifting discursive and sociopolitical tectonics. The exhibition features videos of Raimundi-Ortiz in the role of Chuleta, a character that Genocchio describes as a “young,” “foulmouthed, opinionated and sassy” “Latina from the projects.”6 In Topic One: Contemporary Art (2006), Raimundi-Ortiz as Chuleta wears her dark hair cut short with well-articulated curls radiating neatly around her face. Appearing in a white shirt with large hoop earrings dangling from her ears, she sits in a spare, unadorned room. A television appears behind the artist’s right shoulder, and a water pipe and closet appear over her left. In keeping with the mode of address that has become de rigueur on videosharing web sites, Chuleta looks directly into the camera and carries on a one-sided conversation about contemporary art. The characteristics that Genocchio attributes to Chuleta should exclude her from understanding and enjoying art, but contrary to stereotypical expectations, Chuleta is deeply invested in contemporary art. She explains that she learned about contemporary art in “class and at school” so that when she visited museums she would understand the work she saw and feel comfortable in the art-world setting.7 Emboldened with her knowledge, Chuleta decides to undertake a series of direct-address videos to explicate complicated art-world related themes. Chuleta’s goal is political, and she is authorized to employ aspects of her identifications to reach her aim: she endeavors to “bridge the gap between the art world and people like us, people like me and yous” and “open a dialogue with the white box community.”8 People “be underestimating” us “blacks and Puerto Ricans,” she explains, “People don’t really be thinking that we go to museums and stuff like that.”9 Chuleta is focused, so she first tackles the notion of “white cube.” She provides a literal definition—

gallery and museum exhibition space that is contained within four walls that are generally, but not always, painted white. But she quickly signifies on that meaning, explaining that white boxes exist outside of rarefied environments in places like the Bronx. She goes on to set up an opposition between white-box people and “people like me and yous.”10 In the space of about three minutes, Chuleta explicates a complicated discourse to which exhibitions, articles, and entire books are dedicated, and she does it in language and posture that is informed by her experiences as an ethnoracially marked woman of a particular class: Identity politics is when people be makin’ artwork about who they are, like who am I, what am I. You be makin’ pictures about yourself, and who you are. . . . I guess it was happening a lot in the 90’s, and a lot of people were talking about, making artwork about who they are, who they be. Right, like basically, who’re your peeps. You know, you want to show yourself off, put it out there—you, like, gay, you black, you Puerto Rican, whatever.11 “At some point,” she continues, “the white box decided, [started] talking about identity politics being over.”12 The idea of “identity politics being over” leads her to discuss the notion of “post,” as in “New York Post but different,” she clarifies for her viewers: “ ‘post’ means ‘after.’ ” Chuleta then takes up the discourse “postidentity politics”: After the season passed of identity politics, people are making more identity politics, only it’s a little different ’cause people already seen all the other stuff. So, it’s like you took identity politics art and flipped it. It’s the same but different, but it’s the same. It’s like a recipe, and you have leftovers and you take it and cook it again. That’s postidentity politics. You still talking about identity, but it’s after the fact.13 Her explication of the theme of “identity politics” art is a rehearsed study of frankness and authenticity. In that way, Topic One and other Ask Chuleta performances allow Raimundi-Ortiz to perform the politics of identity through her enacting of the particularities of her assumed identity. At the same time, she undertakes a mature and complex dialogue about the discourse with the art-world establishment. The videos in the Ask Chuleta project take a didactic or instructional form, which is significant; it speaks to the important roles audience and community play in the making and taking on of identity.14 In that respect, Conclusion

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Raimundi-Ortiz is covering her bases in her distribution of her artwork and ideas. She is taking a traditional approach by establishing herself within the art world, having placed shows of her videos, performances, and mural-size drawings at the Bronx Museum and the Jersey City Museum among other cultural institutions. At the same time, she distributes her performance projects in a grassroots and viral way, posting Topic One: Contemporary Art to the video-sharing web site YouTube, where artists disseminate their work among millions of videos posted by nerds, exhibitionists, and self-described experts, among other users. In the space of the museum, the artist reaches an audience specific to the art world, one that attends art exhibitions and possesses knowledge about the topics her character discusses. Through YouTube, she reaches diverse audiences that have a demonstrated interest in viral distribution and performance art or troll the site for unique postings. By employing such diverse venues, Raimundi-Ortiz has the potential to reach a large, broad, and multitudinous ­audience. Chuleta is guaranteed to encounter both art-world and non-art-world audiences as well, yet she directs her wisdom to people “like us.” Just as the Mythic Being provided Piper with the cover to talk back to her art-world colleagues, Chuleta allows Raimundi-Ortiz to address those gate-keeping, white-cube individuals who would keep her and others out of museums and galleries.15 At the same time, via YouTube, Chuleta (and RaimundiOrtiz) can reach her “peeps,” individuals whose intersectional identifications—racially marked, lower- and working-class background, interested in art, visit museums, or like sharing personal videos among them—may align with hers. This is an instance of double-voicedness that Piper also employed: the persona allows the artist to assume the power to converse with multiple constituencies simultaneously. As the persona, the artist infiltrates the art world, the “white cube” space that does not willingly offer itself to working-class people of color like her, effectively speaking truth to power. In that respect, Raimundi-Ortiz and her character Chuleta are empowered: each has attained knowledge about art and footing in the art world despite efforts by the white-box community to dismiss people like her out of hand. Their knowledge and authority sanction them to share and transmit. Make no mistake, Chuleta’s, and likely Raimundi-Ortiz’s, aim is not merely to convey information about art and the art world:

We gonna figure this out. That way, you can go. You can take your son, your man’s seed to the museum, and be showin’ him stuff. . . . People won’t be sayin’ shit to you about bein’ in a museum because you know your shit. Know what I’m sayin’? I’m trying to bridge gaps and build communities. We got to get our peeps goin’ to the museums and shit. That’s, like, a big deal to me, that’s mad important.16 Her goal is larger: she wants her “peeps” to possess the same entitlement and privilege to art and museums as white-box people have. Possessing knowledge and the authority to transmit it is one thing; having the means to distribute it is quite another. Likewise, constituting an audience to receive that knowledge is yet another obstacle to access. Raimundi-Ortiz navigates that conundrum differently than did Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith. Just as Piper and Antin took their work to the streets, Raimundi-Ortiz and other younger artists use the Internet and viral technologies to reach various publics and designate an audience. Indeed, to some extent, the artist’s and persona’s agency are predicated on the (purported) democratizing effects of the Internet and social networking web sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. The notion that the Internet is a democratic and open public sphere where everyone has the potential to offer instruction, evaluate and offer opinion, find an audience, and join a community is an idealistic goal, but a flawed reality. Computers and Internet technology are not universally available, and users must meet certain criteria, such as having access to a computer, the Internet, a digital camera, and training, in order to participate in the democratic ideal. Nevertheless, Piper’s recent decision to self-publish her multivolume philosophical treatise Rationality and the Structure of the Self (2009) on her web site and, in the political realm, the success of candidate Obama’s web-based organizing and fundraising prove that web and viral technologies can offer unprecedented access to distribution and community-formation.17 The artist Erica Lord is also making use of the Internet to disseminate her work, which, because of the way it interrogates identifications, demonstrates an intellectual and discursive kinship with that of Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith. Her Un/Defined Self-Portraits series (2005–2007) is especially relevant since the artist makes photographic portraits of herself while temporarily taking on the identities of others. Twenty of those selfportraits are on display on her web site, where they appear in a grid.18 In each photograph, the artist stands in a well-lighted studio setting before Conclusion

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a white background. She looks directly into the camera and at the viewer in all of the images, but the similarities end there. Self-Portrait 019 (2005) seems to depict an ingénue: her tousled, short blond hair frames her face. She wears vivid red lipstick, her cheeks have a pink hue, and hoops dangle from her ears. She raises her chin slightly, lowers her eyelids suggestively, and peers down at the viewer with lips parted. Her look suggests sexiness. Self-Portrait 012 (2005) shows Lord as a gender-neutral figure donning a white crewneck t-shirt and a trucker’s cap. Wearing a half-smile on her lips and unsmiling eyes, this persona communicates anything but seduction; reluctance and caution are her or his affect. For Self-Portrait 022 (2005), the artist wears a hooded sweatshirt with illegible printed text on the chest. Here, she takes on the appearance of a timid high school or college student. Her dark hair is pulled back, and she wears glasses that focus attention on her blue-green eyes. Pushing her head back into the folds of her sweatshirt, her posture mirrors that of a turtle. She recedes from the viewer in a manner that conveys diffidence and a lack of confidence. The sheer multiplicity of identities as which Lord pictures herself shows a strong relationship to Lee’s and Smith’s practices in particular. Likewise, one might compare Lord’s self-portraits to Cindy Sherman’s film stillimages, in which she played characters that seemed to be plucked from various fictional “B” movies. The fact that Lord titles her images “selfportraits” suggests serious distinctions, however, for neither Lee, Smith, nor Sherman admits to portraying her own self. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that in Un/Defined Self-Portraits Lord does not place her selves into fragmented or time-stopped narratives, real or imaginary, as do Lee, Smith, and Sherman. Instead, she enacts and subsequently pictures different versions of her self as a way to explore, bolster, and maintain hold on her whole, integral self—actions she shares with Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith. Just as the artists studied here perform rhetorical versions of themselves, Lord assumes the mantle of “artist” to situate her work and intentions: “In order to sustain a genuine self, I create a world in which I shift to become one or all of my multiple visions of self.”19 Nowhere is the process of enacting multiple selves to configure an integral self more visible than in two works that appear, at first glance, to be exactly the same. These photographs purport to present “Erica Lord, as herself,” in contrast to the other self-portraits in the series. For both images, she parts her dark hair right of center and pulls it away from her face. She appears to be free of makeup, is without jewelry, and wears a

black top that reveals her shoulders and chest. In Self-Portrait 009 (2005), she extends and elongates her neck, pushing her chin forward slightly. Her mouth closes sternly. Her partially dilated light blue eyes look directly into the camera in an expression that hints at confrontation. In the other, SelfPortrait 010 (2005), the artist positions her neck neutrally, and her mouth appears firmly closed. With eyes whose color vacillates between green and brown, she gazes into the lens in an earnest way. Apart from the shifts in eye color and posture, the other significant difference in the images regards lighting: the former is awash in light, and the latter is not. The effect is this: in the image in which the artist’s eyes are blue, her skin appears to be paler than in the image in which her eyes are dark. Together the two photographs compose a study of phenotype—how it is read and worn—and its relationship to identity. Does the figure, which may or not be the “real” Erica Lord, appear more or less racially marked? Does the artist, who controlled the image making, determine how the figures’ ethnoracial differences are read? And what are the effects of those determinations? That an artist whose ethnoracial background is mixed Native Alaskan and European American would undertake such an examination is noteworthy: not only does it demonstrate an interrogation of how ethnoracial identity is marked, experienced, and read, but it also reveals the important role that power, authority, and self-determination play in making identity. Un/Defined Self Portraits shows that, for Lord, selfdetermination and self-definition are well within reason and her grasp; they are made possible through her enacting of multiple selves in her art. Assuming the role of author-artist, she offers insight into her practice and stresses the importance of process and fluidity in maintaining self: “It is through art or ritual that I discover ways to find a root and affirm my position as a shifting self, understanding that in order to survive, identity and culture cannot be static.”20 Indeed, in her declaration that “it is time for us to self-determine, to control our representation,” Lord voices the lessons that Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s performances teach: identifications are ever changing, they are made alone and with audiences, and they are appropriate platforms from which to make art.21 Even while autonomy, access, and enfranchisement remain critical objectives within the politics of identity, the balance of power has shifted, and younger artists, Raimundi-Ortiz and Lord among others, are upping the ante, creating identity-crossing performances that, like Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s projects, simultaneously trouble and affirm the sigConclusion

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nificance of the boundaries between identifications.22 While it is difficult to predict the directions that performances across ethnic, class, gender, and racial divisions will take, one thing is certain: they will continue to be enriched and complicated by the Internet, where the adoption of avatars and aliases is commonplace. Likewise, the effect of viral technologies, with their promise of democratic distribution and instantaneous communityformation, on performances that involve creating and enacting “others” cannot yet be measured. Nonetheless, if Lord’s and Raimundi-Ortiz’s use of web and viral technologies is any indication of the discursive routes and political agendas that will be plotted, then new performances of “others” will continue to be indebted to Antin, Lee, Piper, and Smith. The projects studied here have expanded the discourse that is the politics of identity by challenging notions of community, individual agency, difference, and sameness. At the same time, they have contributed to advancement by investigating the roles form, media, and talent play in such performances. Antin’s, Lee’s, Piper’s, and Smith’s boundary-crossing performances, with their emphasis on achieving artistic autonomy through enacting “others,” suggest that how one’s intersectional identifications affect one’s access to power will continue to matter. To be sure, artists will continue to cross identity boundaries and enact “others,” as a way to seize the agency to make identity.

Notes

Notes to the Preface



1 As teaching assistant, I was responsible for reading the required texts and watching the assigned films that ranged from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1816, 1831) to George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1916) to Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982, 1991). I was startled to find that the majority of the texts focused on characters that shape shifted, including Pygmalion’s Eliza Doolittle, who changed from working-class street urchin to high-society lady, or that were composites, such as Frankenstein’s monster, whose life depended on the reanimation of the different parts of cadavers. Narratives such as Pygmalion appeared progressive and concerned with trampling the stifling categories that distinguished different classes of beings from one another. Others, including Frankenstein, worked to show humanity in the sub, super, and not-human. Still others, including I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), were reactionary; they sought to maintain and stiffen the boundaries between different categories of beings. In my mind, however, all of the narratives were allegories that centered on the issue of racial difference. 2 In the United States, “slave” means “black person.” With that in mind, perhaps the filmmaker assumed that “universal” (read white) audiences would not be able to sympathize with the “specificity” of black characters (especially if they were played by black actors).

Notes to the Introduction 1 My appreciation to Alex Nemerov and Laura Wexler who, in conversations separated by time and distance, encouraged me to write about this image. 2 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 209. 3 One of the problems of identity is that it has been projected as exclusionary and homogenizing. For instance, if an individual is forced to choose between identifying as either “woman” or “black,” then she is assumed to have the same thoughts, feelings, and ideas of other members of said group. In reality, the various identities, including class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation that an individual occupies implicate one another and therefore conspire against her in a variety of ways. Numerous scholars have addressed this matter. For excellent examples, see Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 167; and Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 4 There are meaningful differences between the phrases and philosophies behind “the politics of identity” and “identity politics” that warrant clarification. The term “identity politics” was probably first articulated in “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” a manifesto written by the black feminist Combahee River Collective in 1975. Their understanding of “identity politics” is based in their awareness that their “sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situations . . . and their political struggles unique” (273). The document suggests that the collective understood identity as a political platform that both countered various kinds of “oppression” (gender, heterosexist, economic, and racial, among others) and fostered self-affirmation or “healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community” (275). In the collective’s statement, “identity politics” signified joining with likeminded or like-looking people to resist oppression, pursue equal rights, and affirm oneself, but it has since taken on different meanings. “Identity politics” has become synonymous with “the personal is political,” a slogan popularized during the women’s rights movement. In its original usage, the latter phrase voiced the radical notion that experiences that patriarchy deemed “personal” (that is, private) were, in fact, common to many women and thus deserved public expression and could be used as political rallying points. Both phrases have since been co-opted, neutralized, and worse—characterized as solipsistic and self-interested. The term “identity politics art” has other meanings still. It can be a periodizing phrase, referring to artworks made during the late 1980s and early 1990s. More often, it is used derisively, to dismiss an artist and her work. Some critics have discredited so-called identity politics art by determining that artists producing during that period made the content of their own identities the subjects of their art, to the exclusion and detriment of form and medium. I do not subscribe to that opinion. 5 See Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.

6 The black arts movement and feminist art are excellent examples of movements in which artists controlled the representations of their cultural identities. Discussion of earlier examples, including the creation of American modernism in the 1920s and the New Negro movement, will follow. 7 For instance, Gayatri Spivak seems to split the difference when she suggests that identity-based groups have been, and continue to be, a necessary fiction and recommends a “strategic essentialism” that is political and socially expedient, temporary, and sensitive to the multiple identity positions that all individuals maintain. Danius and Jonsson, “An Interview with Gayatri Spivak.” Other opponents, such as Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky among others who published tracts in the late 1990s, contend that “identity politics,” under which they would gather feminism, gay rights, racial consciousness, multiculturalism, disability rights, and ethnic particularism, disrupt efforts toward class and economic equality. They also support a return to Enlightenment notions of universal humanism in which individuals are understood to have the capacity to transcend their ethnic, gender, racial, national, sexual, and physical particularities, focus on reason, and initiate equality and freedom for all people. Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams; and Tomasky, Left for Dead. 8 For a succinct summary of the postidentity “movement,” see Millner, “Post Post-Identity.” 9 Story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” 10 American modern artists working in the early twentieth century sought to create a uniquely American school of art. They defined American culture in opposition to European culture, thereby encouraging artists to look to their own backyard rather than to the yard across the Atlantic for artistic subject matter. The author Van Wyck Brooks called on artists to locate a “usable past” with which to create modern American art. The anthropologist and ethnographer Constance Rourke found a “usable past” by studying American humor and social types. Rourke and other students of American culture identified idiosyncrasies in language, song, folk art, and customs, accorded these unique cultural forms respect, and integrated them into their art. Other writers, Wanda Corn points out, encouraged artists to locate a “usable present” “in the country’s newness and . . . lack of any weighty past.” Corn, The Great American Thing, xv. She explains that, in their attempts to establish an American cultural identity, the group, centered around Alfred Stieglitz, practically commandeered the words “American,” “soil,” and “spirit,” lived their lives shuttling between urban and rural areas in an effort to escape the vulgarity of commercialism and commune with nature, and portrayed subjects they identified as uniquely “American.” Cultural nationalism, registered as a political and cultural attachment to American identity, Corn says, led early American modernists to create a uniquely American art. Corn, The Great American Thing, 31. Advocates for the New Negro movement took a similar tack in their pur-

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suit of the creation of a unique “Negro” art. In his essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” W. E. B. Du Bois announced that a “new spirit” had taken hold of African American people, and then encouraged African American artists to portray it. He posed a series of questions that would incite artist-readers to action: “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written? What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” (102). Du Bois calculated that black artists would not want the depiction of their people to be left to white artists alone, and he anticipated that they would want to counteract the negative and degrading portrayals of blacks by white artists by producing their own representations, writing that “it is the bounded duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of beauty, of the preservation of beauty, of the realization of beauty” (102). Du Bois asserted that “all art is propaganda and ever must be” (103). It was through artistic production, Du Bois concluded, that black people would “compel recognition” and ultimately “rate as human” (104). Alain Locke was also keen for black artists to look to African art as racial and cultural patrimony and fodder for art, as he argued in his 1925 essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts.” He reminded readers that “the American Negro brought over [from Africa] an emotional inheritance, a deep-seated aesthetic endowment” and that “the sensitive artistic mind of the American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive from African art a profound and galvanizing influence” (137). He advocated the creation of “a school of Negro art, a local and a racially representative tradition” (141). Black art, he urged, “must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid,” and black artists should likewise take their lead from their European counterparts such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, and Max Pechstein who had “discovered” African art, and “gain from the arts of the [African] forefathers . . . the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, or style, or technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery” (140 and 138). 11 The project of linking biology to identity probably began as early as the Enlightenment. At that point, some groups, especially Western Europeans, were deemed to possess superior faculties of intellect, reason, and free will. At the same time, Enlightenment theories and colonialist doctrines naturalized and rationalized the position of native peoples from Africa and the Americas as inferior in terms of intellect and reason. In time, the colonialist program, with support from the scientific and medical fields, tied free will and power to race: those in power were “naturally” better than those without. Discourses that separate biology from identity work in direct opposition to these earlier knowledge-power enterprises. 12 Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. 13 The Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary defines “identity” in the following ways: 1) “The

14

15 16 17

18 19 20



21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness;” and 2) “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality. In Psychology, the condition or fact of remaining the same person throughout the various phases of existence; continuity of the personality.” Butler, “Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex”; and Hall, “New Ethnicities.” A prime example is the moniker “Black,” which, prior to its reappropriation by people who had formerly been called “Negroes”—­before that, “colored”—in the late 1960s, had been a term of derision applied by whites to Americans with African ancestry. Hall, “Subject in History,” 291. Ibid. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 167. He points out that single-identity categories are always split into pairs of representations, as in the case of “femininity,” which is represented simultaneously as “Madonna and Whore,” or blackness, which is portrayed as “noble savage and violent avenger” (ibid.). The previous examples are also oppositional; that is, identity categories are always matched with an opposing representation: masculine/feminine, white/black, straight/ gay. Ibid. Ibid. Foster, Class-Passing. Various scholars have taken up the same issue of the representation of identity: Richard Dyer, Paul Gilroy, and George Lipsitz have related it to class, ethnicity, and race, and Judith Butler has related it to gender and sexual orientation. They seem to agree that identity (blackness, whiteness, womanhood, masculinity, and so forth) is represented as “authentic,” stable, and pre- and overdetermined and that it is presented as though structured around dyads (black/white, male/female, and so forth). Favor, Authentic Blackness, 4; and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Dyer, White. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness. Holthouse, “Shirley Q. Liquor, After Imus.” Roth, The Human Stain. Mariane Pearl’s ethnic background is described as “Dutch-Jewish . . . Cubanblack-Hispanic-Chinese,” in McAlpin, “Collateral Damage.” I borrow the term “personae-play” from Moira Roth, interview with author, April 2003. This definition of passing is rooted in a nineteenth-century understanding of race, and while it still has relevance, the meanings and instances of passing are considerably more diverse today. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays.

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51

Ibid., 25. Lott, Love and Theft, 6. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 50–51. Toll, Blacking Up, 201. Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky.” Garber, Vested Interests, 10–11. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 275–76. Ibid., 279. See also Newton, Mother Camp; and Ross, “Uses of Camp.” Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 280. Phelan, Unmarked, 17. Ibid. Ibid. For a useful theory of the utopian and generative work of performance, see Dolan, Utopia in Performance. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. See also Butler, Bodies That Matter; and Derrida, “Signature Event Context.” Benhabib, “The Liberal Imagination and the Four Dogmas of Multiculturalism,” 411. Dyer, “The Role of Stereotypes,” in The Matter of Images. Lee, Performing Asian America, 89. Dyer also suggests considering “who controls and defines [stereotypes], [and] what interests they serve” so that one may see that the corrupt information proffered by stereotypes functions to perpetuate power differentials and maintain the status quo. Dyer, “The Role of Stereotypes,” 12. Lee’s understanding of stereotypes is indebted to Homi Bhabha’s essay “The Other Question,” in which he says that stereotyping “is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices” but “a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressivity.” Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in Screen 24 (1983), 33–34. Like Bhabha, Lee locates the power of the stereotype in its ambivalence: the majority must reassert the stereotype continually in order to hide its anxiety and perpetuate its hegemony. Lee, Performing Asian America, 96. Since the controversy surrounding the NEA and the so-called NEA 4 (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes), negative connotations have been assigned to the term “performance artist” as a way to disqualify performance as an appropriate art medium and to denigrate its practitioners as untalented, self-serving, and sexually deviant. Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory.

Notes to Chapter One: Adrian Piper Adrian Piper’s works that are cited frequently will be referenced at the first occurrence with an endnote that provides author last name and the work’s main title. Thereafter, as long as no other citation intervenes or there is not a full paragraph in between without any citations, all citations will be understood to be to this work and only page numbers will be provided in parentheses. If another work is cited subsequently or there is a full paragraph without any citations, then the next citation to Piper’s work will be provided in an endnote. 1 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 102 and 147. 2 The word “mugging” is mine. 3 Piper was interviewed in Peter Kennedy’s film Other Than Art’s Sake (1973). During the course of the filmed conversation, Piper transforms into character by putting on an Afro wig and mustache, and then, the Mythic Being walks down a busy street uttering a “mantra.” 4 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 103. 5 Cottingham, “The ‘Autobiography’ of Adrian Piper”; Thelma Golden, “My Brother”; John Bowles, “Bodies of Work”; and Franklin Sirmans, “The Beat Goes On.” 6 Malcolm X, “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” in New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary AfroAmerican Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: Penguin, 1972), 563. 7 Ibid. 8 Karenga, The Quotable Karenga, 6. 9 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 715. 10 Lippard, “Judy Chicago, Talking to Lucy R. Lippard.” 11 Ibid. 12 Neal, “Any Day Now,” 54. 13 Ibid. 14 Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan, 10. 15 Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges,” 363. 16 Donaldson, “The Role We Want for Black Art,” 17. 17 Neal, “Any Day Now.” 18 Lippard, From the Center, 148. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Wilding, “Women Artists and Female Imagery,” 289. 21 Chicago, Through the Flower, 143–44. 22 Donaldson, “Africobra 1,” 80. 23 Barbara Jones Hogu, “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA.” 24 I borrow this phrase from Moira Roth, interview with author, April 2003. 25 Piper claims to have been unaware of the narrative performances that were taking place on the West Coast. E-mail interview with the artist, February

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26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

2004. Suzanne Lacy, Moira Roth, and Josephine Withers have argued that because California feminist performance was quite theater oriented, it was different from the more minimalist-based performance art practiced by Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, and Laurie Anderson in New York. See Roth and López, “A Conversation with Suzanne Lacy,” 42; and Withers, “Feminist Performance Art,” 161. Roth, The Amazing Decade, 65. Ibid., 102. Roth and López, “A Conversation with Suzanne Lacy,” 42–43. Lorraine O’Grady’s persona Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire and its related performances demand critical attention. Amelia Jones discusses these and other matters pertaining to Seedbed in “The Body in Action.” Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 31. In response to the war campaigns, Piper withdrew her contribution to the Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects show at the New York Cultural Center. Piper, Talking to Myself. Piper reports that she founded a “women’s consciousness-raising group” in 1971. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 189. Many other women artist political groups were founded. For instance, Women, Students, and Artists for Black Art Liberation, started by Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace, demonstrated against the lack of representation of women artists of color in museums and galleries. On the West Coast, Judy Chicago founded the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State University, and the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists launched demonstrations against the Art and Technology exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art because no women artists were included. Interview with artist, 9 November 2006. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 31. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187–88. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 44–43. For more on the solipsism of art of this period, see Frank, “Auto-Art.” Fellow artist Rosemary Mayer, Vito Acconci’s then-wife and Piper’s friend, documented these and other Catalysis actions photographically. Laurel Fredrickson suggests that viewers were not aware that they were experiencing art and thought instead that Piper was mentally disturbed. The author argues that Piper had to record and display the documents of the performance in an art context in order for the performances to be ratified as art. Fredrickson, “Confrontation and Catalysis.” Lippard, From the Center, 170. Ibid. Ibid. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 55.

45 Identity-play has long been part of Piper’s life (101). After reading The Diary of Anne Frank as an adolescent, for instance, Piper projected herself into the character of the Jewish teenager and imagined a life in hiding. Similarly, in 1966, Piper tried on a new gender identity by signing “Adrianne”—the more feminine spelling of the name her parents gave her—to her Drawing of Phillip Zohn (1966). In September 1991, Piper wrote a poem titled “My Slave Name” that deals with this very issue. Adrian Piper, Decide Who You Are, xxix. As late as 1996, the year her two-volume book Out of Order, Out of Sight was published, the artist admitted to identifying with “an upper-class heterosexual WASP male, the pampered upon only son of doting parents” (Out of Order, Out of Sight, xxxiv). She admitted to possessing “the deep-seated, optimistic sense of entitlement,” with its attendant narratives of power, comfort, and prestige, which are supposed to belong to white men (ibid.). 46 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 106. 47 Ibid., 147. It was not until 1991, in a lecture titled “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present II,” that Piper termed the Mythic Being “a young black male,” 263. 48 Piper’s description of the man’s clothing and physical appearance evokes associations of homelessness. In addition, her description of his hair as twisted into little braids that “stuck straight out all over his head, giving a pincushion effect” corresponds to the visual image of the racial stereotype of the “pickaninny.” 49 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 4–5. 50 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, 235. 51 Ibid., 13. 52 Ibid., 236. 53 Dyer, The Matter of Images, 11. 54 Klapp, Heroes, Villains, and Fools. 55 Dyer, The Matter of Images, 15–16. 56 Ibid. 57 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 124. 58 Gray, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” 179. 59 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 117. 60 The phrase “cruising white women” comes from a group of photographs— titled “The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women” (1975)—in the series. I use the word “mugging” to describe the action that appears to take place in the photographs “The Mythic Being: Getting Back” (1975), in which the Mythic Being appears to overtake another man. These Mythic Being photographs were taken by James Gutman, a photographer in Cambridge. E-mail interview with artist, February 2004. 61 hooks, “Feminism Inside,” 131. 62 Ibid. 63 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 138. Her assumption seems to have been correct. Many years later, she recalled that she understood herself “as an object

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64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72



73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

of hate and fear in this environment, because I was responded to in that way,” 264. Six photographs are supposed to compose “The Mythic Being: Getting Back,” but only five appear to be extant. Berger, Adrian Piper, 143. Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” Women have taken on the appearance of men throughout history, literature, and film. Though Piper certainly participates in this general history of female cross-dressing, for the purposes of my project, I locate her performance in a more specific history wherein cross-dressing intersects with race-switching. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. My thanks to Pamela Lee for reminding me of the constructedness of this photographic shoot. Lott, Love and Theft. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 50–51. In an entry from 30 September 1973, Piper expressed concern that she had not surpassed the boundary of self and that her own body displayed itself despite its camouflage. After her first public performance of the Mythic Being while she was attending the Lincoln Center Film Festival, she notes “the fineness of my eyebrows” and “the possibility of my protruding breasts (just when I don’t want them, they show up),” aspects of her physical appearance that showed her feminine, not masculine, body (Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 103–4). Insecure in her costume and behavior, she later recalled that she “got really paranoid at times, once when I thought one of the neighborhood men who periodically whistle at me recognized me, once when I saw some familiar faces from the art world” (104). Piper felt her body would not allow her to lose its identity and pass as a man. She also admits how difficult it was to stay in the character of the Mythic Being: “It takes more energy to sustain his attitudes, mannerisms, movements, etc. than I thought” (104). Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 35. Butler, Gender Trouble, 25. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 125. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Lippard, Six Years, vii. Ibid., 42. Pamela Franks provides an excellent and thorough analysis of the mail-art exhibition in her dissertation. See her “Mythic Is as Mythic Does.” It was published in the 29 May 1969 issue of the Village Voice. Franks, “Mythic Is as Mythic Does,” 123. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 118. She also mused that her “drug experiences might have been more traumatic and conflict-ridden, perhaps more sexually than mystically oriented, if she had been a man” (118).

84 Piper has been a yoga practitioner since 1966. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187. See also Piper, “The Meaning of Brahmacharya.” 85 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. 86 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. 87 Judd, “Specific Objects,” 116. 88 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 1–3,” 818. 89 Ibid., 819. 90 Ibid., 818. See also Buchloh, “Three Conversations in 1985,” 51. 91 Ibid. 92 That statement comes from Tony Smith’s recollection of the “revealing experience” he had when driving on an abandoned and unfinished New Jersey turnpike. Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” 742. 93 John Bowles makes the astute observation that, in “Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter,” Piper places the viewer in a sexually submissive position that echoes the performance of fellatio. See Bowles, “ ‘Acting Like a Man’.” 94 Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 32. 95 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 214. 96 Ibid., 214–15. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Piper recalled enjoying drawing, in addition to dancing, because she could capture the “form and likeness of an object” due to her ability to become “the object through perceiving it.” Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 99. She felt that the knowledge she gained through deep perception enabled her to portray an object “better . . . than could a camera” (99). For Piper, her ability to portray an object accurately was grounded in the careful and intense study that becoming an outside object required. Clearly, Piper’s belief that one could become the object through perceiving it is based on the phenomenological and yogic notions that one can surpass boundaries between self and other through deep study and perception. 103 For a more in-depth discussion of Piper’s use of alternate modes of distribution, see Smith, “Remember the Audience,” 46–58. For more on the issue of alternate modes of art distribution, see Gwen Allen and Cherise Smith, eds., Art Journal 66, no. 1 (2007), 41–91. 104 Piper terms this audience “educated and intellectual but non-specialized.” E-mail interview with author, 1 February 2006. 105 For an interesting account of how the Village Voice affected journalism and alternate news publications, see Menand, “It Took a Village.” 106 In 1974, when Piper placed the majority of her Mythic Being advertisements,

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107 108

109

110

111 112

113

114

the Voice circulated between 140,000 and 150,000 copies. “Audit ReportNewspaper,” Audit Bureau of Circulation, 1974. Demographic statistics for Voice readership were not recorded at that time. This citation is correct. E-mail interview with artist, 1 February 2006. The artist and critic John Perreault had a regular column in which he chronicled art-world happenings, including shows, lectures, and exhibitions, that interested artists and other art professionals. McAuliffe, The Great American Newspaper, 219. Judy Chicago and her agent commissioned the announcement of her exhibition. Susannah E. Rodee, executive director of Through the Flower, phone conversation with the author, 11 December 2006. I am not certain whether the other artists’ respective galleries paid for their advertisements. Susan Richmond discusses these materials in relation to Lynda Benglis’s work in Richmond, “Put-Ons and Take-Offs.” While I don’t have proof, I think it is likely that the advertisements were commissioned by the artists, who also paid their costs. Here, I use Lynda Benglis as an example: she was required by the Artforum editorial board to pay twice the regular fee for the advertisement because several of its members found the photograph offensive. See Meyer, “Bone of Contention”; and Richmond, “The Artforum Controversy of 1974.” Remember that Piper did not sell her work at the time, nor did she have gallery representation to pay the fees. It is worth noting that the politics of bearing a nude young black female body were, and continue to be, different than those of bearing a young nude white female body. The significance of this distinction seems not to have been lost on Piper. By this point she had mounted the private performances of Food for the Spirit (1970–71), during which she photographically recorded her mostly nude body. While her text about Food for the Spirit was published in High Performance 4, no. 1 (1981), she did not distribute the photographs publicly until 1997, when they were printed by the Thomas Erben Gallery. Franks, “Mythic Is as Mythic Does,” 111 and 209. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”; and Smithson, “Incidents of MirrorTravel in the Yucatan.” Interestingly, Piper borrowed money from LeWitt to undertake the advertising aspect of the Mythic Being project. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 102. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 138.

Notes to Chapter Two: Eleanor Antin Eleanor Antin’s works that are cited frequently will be referenced at the first occurrence with an endnote that provides the author’s last name and the work’s main title. Thereafter, as long as no other citation intervenes or there is not a full paragraph in between without any citations, all citations will be understood to be to this work and only page numbers will be provided in

parentheses. If another work is cited subsequently or there is a full paragraph without any citations, then the next citation to Antin’s work will be provided in an endnote. 1 Antin, “Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev,” 45. 2 Eleanora Antinova’s life story begins in Antin’s 1979 playlike piece Before the Revolution, which reveals the character’s background as an American-born black woman who leaves the United States for Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. The self-taught dancer takes the stage name Eleanora Antinova when she joins Sergei Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes, where, much to the ballerina’s chagrin, she is relegated to dance in Orientalist-themed productions with names like L’Esclave, Pocahontas, The Prisoner of Persia, and The Hebrews, due to her dark skin and unsophisticated dancing. The following year, Antinova’s story was expanded in the performance lasting three weeks that is chronicled in the book Being Antinova, published in 1983. Described as the “journal” Antin kept “to aid her in recalling the multitude of events that would otherwise have slipped away,” Being Antinova gathers Antin’s writings about, and musings on, her experiences as Antinova. It is, in fact, a performance in and of itself. Three years later, Antinova appeared in Help! I’m in Seattle, a playlike performance that is set in the Depression era and explores her life as a black woman entertainer in the racially hostile United States. The final Eleanora Antinova performance, Who Cares about a Ballerina? (1987), is a two-woman theatrical production set in the late 1980s. It finds the washed-up former ballerina attempting to write her memoirs but getting side-tracked by her memories. Later that same year, Antinova appears in Antin’s video From the Archives of Modern Art, a collection of short films that was supposed to have been found at a defunct movie studio in Los Angeles. Clearly, the story of Antin’s black ballerina is as dense and elaborate as it is made up! 3 Maria Tallchief is probably the best-known Native American ballerina from the period, but there were four others: Yvonne Chouteau, Marjorie Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Moscelyne Larkin. Ballets Russes, dir. Geller and Goldfine (2005). 4 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work”; and Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art. 5 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 73, italics in original. 6 Ibid., 74. 7 Ibid., 81. 8 Ibid., 82, italics in original. 9 Foster, “Postmodernism,” ix–x. 10 Ibid., ix. 11 Ibid., xii. 12 Ibid., xv, italics mine. 13 Ibid. 14 Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 171.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 180, italics in original. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 183. Foster, “Subversive Signs,” quoted in Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 184. Lippard, Six Years, vii–xvii. See Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” for more on this. Antin, Being Antinova, 66. Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back; and Smith, Home Girls. Cade Bambara, “Foreword,” vi. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., vi–vii. Moraga, “Preface,” xiii. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xiv. Ibid. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 272. Also available in Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back. Ibid. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 275 and 281. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 99. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 99, italics in original. Ibid., 101. Pogrebin, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.” Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 62. Pnina Tobin quoted in Pogrebin, 69. Smith, Home Girls. Ibid., xxvi. Ibid., xxxii. Ibid., xxxiv. Ibid., xl. Ibid., xli. Foster, “Postmodernism,” xv. These ideas and concerns were not only legitimate but also widely supported, evidenced in the fact that the Combahee River Collective’s statement was published in no fewer than three venues in less than five years. By 1986, This Bridge had sold more than eighty-six thousand copies, according to the front cover (colophon page) of the 1986 printing.

54 Antin, Letter to the editor, 7. 55 Garber, Vested Interests, 17. 56 Mendieta, Dialectics of Isolation. The A.I.R. Gallery was the exhibition venue for the women’s art group Artists in Residence. The show featured the work of several women artists of color including that of Mexican-American artist Judy Baca, who was based in California, and the African American performance and installation artist Senga Nengudi, who was based in both New York and California. 57 Pindell, “Free, White and 21,” 31. 58 Ibid., 39. 59 Pindell, Free, White and 21 (1980). 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 In that way, Pindell references the (perceived) impossibility inherent to a black person’s looking white by merely wearing a blond wig and applying white face powder. 63 The title of this section references Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” found in his book The White Negro. In it, he tailors a suit made up of several stereotypes of black masculinity, then puts it on to become the hipster or “white Negro.” The “Negroes” on whom Mailer modeled his “white Negroes” were not flesh-and-blood men the author encountered in his life. Rather the “Negroes” he describes are the stereotypes of the black man as sexual predator, noble savage, and naive primitive. His “Negroes” were perverse and promiscuous “psychopaths” who were forced “to develop an alternate mode of being” due to the alienation and discrimination they encountered. Mailer imagined that they hated themselves because they were “hated from outside.” Mailer, The White Negro, 220. Michele Wallace suggests, in her book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (42), that Mailer “was in the grip of a bad case of the I’ve-got-the-psuedo-anglo-saxon-technologicalmale-menopausal-twentieth-century-civilized man’s blues” for which he “needed an antidote” when he wrote the essay. Mailer’s misogynist fantasy figures were created to carry him from what he perceived to be the emasculating effects of white liberal mores and to the supermasculinity, strength, and power that the Korean War had wrested from white men. 64 Antin, Being Antinova, 1. 65 Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 30. 66 Ibid., 49. 67 Ibid., 12. 68 Throughout his analysis, Rogin is careful to remind readers that black people were displaced by blackface performances mounted by whites. He critiques Lott’s interest in the permeability of the color line and the mutability of identity and argues that “blackface allowed whites to turn black and back again.” Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 24. He points out that the stakes are low for whites who enact blackface performances because “those with the insignias

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94

95 96 97

of power can play at giving them up . . . without putting themselves at risk.” Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 34. Ibid., 92 and 90. Tucker, “Blackface,” 33. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Fields, Sophie Tucker. Mezzrow, Really the Blues, 21. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Mezzrow also distanced himself from white and Jewish jazz musicians and the “white race” generally because, he writes, he “never could dig the phony idea of a race—if we were a ‘race’.” He went so far as to accuse some of his fellow Jewish counterparts, including Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson, of playing “a commercial excuse for the real thing.” Ibid., 57–58. Ibid., 110. Damon, “Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender,” 155. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Antin, Being Antinova, 9. I thank John MacKiernan Gonzalez and Frank Guridy for pointing out to me Stokely Carmichael’s background. Damon, “Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender,” 158. Ibid., 159. Irving Howe puts forth a similar argument in relation to Jewish blackface entertainers, “Blacking their faces seems to have enabled the Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves.” Howe, “Journeys Outward,” 563. Damon, “Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender,” 158. Howe also weighs in on this, seeming to hope that “so many Jewish entertainers” worked in blackface because of “some deeper affinity” with African Americans but admitting that “perhaps it was no more than shrewd opportunism, an eagerness to give audiences exactly what they seemed to want.” Howe, “Journeys Outward,” 563. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 148. Gubar, Racechanges, 167. Various scholars have taken up the same issue of the representation of identity: Richard Dyer, Paul Gilroy, and George Lipsitz have related it to class, eth-

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

nicity, and race, and Judith Butler has related it to gender and sexual orientation. They seem to agree that identity (blackness, whiteness, womanhood, masculinity, and so forth) is represented as “authentic,” stable, and pre-and overdetermined, and that it is presented as though structured around dyads (black/white, male/female, and so forth). Favor, Authentic Blackness, 4; and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness. Interview with Antin, August 2005. Golden, Freestyle, 14. Bloom, “Rewriting the Script”; and Early Work of Cindy Sherman. Bloom, “Rewriting the Script,” 169. Dyer, “White,” 44–45. Ibid., 44. Dyer, White. The King later appeared in staged monologues and ink and watercolor drawings that flesh out his character, thoughts, and actions. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” Porter, “Interview with Eleanor Antin,” 36. Ibid. Antin, “A Dialogue with Eleanor Antin,” 217. Antin, Eleanora Antinova Plays, 119. Dyer, “White,” 64. Dyer, White, 127–31. Interestingly, the Jewish entertainer Fanny Brice had a regular routine that featured a “klutzy” ballerina. Cohen, From Hester Street to Hollywood, 46. Later, the Nurse transforms into Eleanor Nightingale, a heroic and empowered character based on Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. She appears in two photographic portfolios, The Angel of Mercy: The Nightingale Family Album (1977) and The Angel of Mercy: My Tour of Duty in the Crimea (1977). The Black Movie Star had a short life because Antin felt the persona had not been fully conceived. Interview with Antin, August 2005. For a photograph of Antin in costume as the Black Movie Star, see Nemser, Art Talk. Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. From Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Washington: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965), quoted in ibid., 88. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, quoted in Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, 117. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 251. Bowen, “On Art and Artists,” 13. Bloom contends that Jewish feminist artists were forced to downplay their Jewishness during the 1970s: “The price of admission into feminist circles in the 1970s seems to have been high for Jewish feminist artists and art histori-

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124 125 126

127 128 129 130 131

132 133 134

135 136 137 138

139

140

ans, who had to erase their Jewish identity to be at the center of a movement in which gender overrode all other kinds of identities.” Bloom, Jewish Identities, 6. Antin, Being Antinova, 12. Boskin and Dorinson, “Ethnic Humor.” See Rose, Jazz Cleopatra. Placing her fictional persona in Europe in the 1920s is not mere coincidence since that moment is recognized as significant to the making of (the myth of) modern art, and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a prime location of that making due to its fostering of radical collaborations between artists of various media. Said, Orientalism. Said is careful to point out that the rise of Orientalism coincides with the rise of anti-Semitism. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 15. The original dancers hailed from the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the Grand Theatre in Moscow. Benois, “The Origins of the Ballets Russes,” 10, 12, 29, and 32. Latimer, “Looking Like a Lesbian,” 56. The costumes were designed by Léon Bakst. Kochno, 42. Similarly, Les Orientales (1910), a series of choreographic sketches, developed from the Russians’ ideas about the Far East. Photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky feature the danseur in a costume inspired by the image of Chinese imperial guards and engaging in Orientalist-derived movements. Likewise, the theme and music of Le Dieu Bleu (1912) were based on “a Hindu legend,” just as the choreography was inspired by “bas-reliefs of Brahman temples and by Siamese dances” that the choreographer had seen in St. Petersburg. The sketch for this ballet’s costume features a dark-skinned male figure posed to approximate the posture of Shiva as Nataraja. Photographs of Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina display the dancers in elaborate headdresses and costumes made of a thick material that skirts stiffly around them. Kochno, 74. de Cossart, “Ida Rubinstein and Diaghilev,” 4. Lieven, The Birth of the Ballets Russes, 53, as quoted in ibid., 6. Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (London: Putnam, 1941), 296, as quoted in Brody, “Legacy of Ida Rubinstein,” 493. Jean Cocteau, “Notes on the Ballet,” in Arsène Alexandre, The Decorative Art of Léon Bakst (London, 1931), 28, as quoted in Brody, “Legacy of Ida Rubinstein,” 493. In her discussion of Sarah Bernhardt, Ann Pelligrini makes a similar argument. Suggesting that the actor’s Jewishness formed the “critical backdrop to her public reception,” Pelligrini contends that Bernhardt’s perceived exoticism fostered her success as a performer. Pelligrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 127. For more on this, see her article “Whiteface Performances.” The strongest evidence that Antin understood the Antinova project in rela-

141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

153 154

155

tion to passing occurs when, in Being Antinova, the artist recounts an incident from her young adult years: Antin’s cousin asked out one of the prettiest girls at their high school, who, it turns out, was passing. It wasn’t until the group of Jewish youth met the girl at her home that they realized she was African American. Upon realizing her African descent, Antin’s cousin treated the young woman poorly, assuming that she was promiscuous and overly sexual, according to stereotypes of black femininity. Similarly, Antin supposes that the young woman, when her African descent is divulged, acts in an overly sexualized way, as a manifestation of the internalization of the stereotype of black women. Antin, Being Antinova, 12–13. Cavaliere, “Eleanor Antin/Eleanora Antinova,” 33. Levin, “Eleanora Antinova,” in Flash Art, (Jan.-Feb., 1981), 101. Ibid. Pincus-Witten, “Entries: Maximalism,” 176. Sayre, “Antinova Dances Again,” 7. Irwin, “Being Antinova by Eleanor Antin, Astro Artz Press.” Danieli, “Eleanor Antin at Tortue,” 59. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Goldberg, “After the Show Is Over . . . .” Ibid. Banes, “The Squirming Point.” Had Antin launched her performance lasting three weeks in 1990 rather than 1980, all critical responses would have been like Banes’s because the political and social climate was more strict: artists were expected to stick to issues and ideas that related to their own identitypositions. Antin, Being Antinova, 7. During a visit to the dry cleaners, Antin projected a similar narrative of race hatred onto the staff when things did not go her way. Upon putting her clothes in for cleaning, the artist balked at the high prices. Her reaction elicited an equally strong reaction from the dry-cleaning staff. Antin attributed their reactions to racism. “I know the game,” she remembers thinking. “It’s called Step on the Shvartsa [Yiddish for black person]” (52). Antin dragged in another “–ism”—sexism—in the narrative she imagined them to think: “She’s only a girl and can’t hit back” (52). Again, Antin labeled people racist and sexist because they did not respond the way she wanted. Statements like these make it difficult to discern whether her projection of racist thoughts onto whites was a critique of white liberal humanism or whether she believed the stereotype that blacks are overly sensitive about racism and prone to exaggerate their grievances. Antin recalls that she encountered her first black female on the same day Antinova encountered the black deliveryman. She describes her as “a beautiful young woman” student at Colombia University (10). The artist reports that this student was so convinced by her Antinova performance that she

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“shook [Antin’s] hand and thanked” her afterward (10). Antin recounts that she encountered a “middle-aged black nurse” who was caregiver to one of the artist’s neighbors a few days later (16). She notes that the nurse gave her a “disapproving look” with a “cranky face,” but she did not record her own reaction (16). Antin’s description of an interaction with the African American artist Faith Ringgold stands out however. Suzanne Lacy introduced Antin to Ringgold at the opening reception of Antin’s exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Antin recalls that when Ringgold met the unnaturally dark-skinned Antin, Ringgold gave her a “sudden look of suspicion” that communicated “ ‘what the Hell is going on here’ ” (20). Antin remembers being “cheered up” by Ringgold’s reaction despite the suspicious and negative feelings it carried. Antin writes that Ringgold’s mood changed: her shoulders relaxed, the chip fell off, and she shook the artist’s hand “with gusto” (20). After that reaction, Antin describes Ringgold as “comfortable,” “solid,” and “nice to hug” (20). I corresponded with Faith Ringgold about this interaction, but I did not receive any information that would paint a fuller picture of the episode.

Notes to Chapter Three: Anna Deavere Smith Anna Deavere Smith’s works that are cited frequently will be referenced at the first occurrence with an endnote that provides the author’s last name and the work’s main title. Thereafter, as long as no other citation intervenes or there is not a full paragraph in between without any citations, all citations will be understood to be to this work and only page numbers will be provided in parentheses. If another work is cited subsequently or there is a full paragraph without any citations, then the next citation to Smith’s work will be provided in an endnote. 1 Smith began work on the one-woman play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 in May of 1992, just one month after the riots in Los Angeles. Smith, Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992, xvii. She received the commission from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles based on the process she developed in her play-series On the Road: A Search for American Character and used in the play Fires in the Mirror (1992). With the assistance of a small staff, Smith located individuals to interview using grassroots and mainstream channels and then recorded her interviews with the subjects. After the interview phase, Smith spoke aloud the interviewees’ words in order to identify significant passages. Those passages were then pieced together to form a script based on “how an interview text works as a physical, audible, performable vehicle” (xxiii, italics in original). Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 premiered at the Mark Taper Forum the following year on 23 May 1993 and closed on 18 July 1993. The play went to other theaters in San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge as well as to the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey and the New York Shakespeare Festival in March 1994, where it was directed by George C. Wolfe (xxvii). The word “monopolylogue” is defined by Jill Dolan as a play in which “a

single performer enacts a number of different characters, knit together in various narratives of experience.” Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2. 2 While the majority of the script writing fell on Smith’s shoulders, substantial textual assistance came from dramaturges. She sought dramaturges whose diverse ethnic, experiential, and professional backgrounds would “disrupt the idea of race as a black and white issue.” She selected Elizabeth Alexander, the African American poet and professor; Oskar Eustis, the European American resident director at the Mark Taper Forum; Dorinne Kondo, the Japanese American anthropologist and professor; and Hector Tobar, the Guatemalan American reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Armstrong and Fuller, “Media Killers.” 3 Because of their political implications, the terms used to signify riots and civil disturbances present particular challenges. Many scholars have noted the value judgments embedded and encoded within words such as “insurrection,” “riot,” “rebellion,” and “civil unrest.” This language, as Thomas L. Dumm suggests, can allude to a moral disapproval of so-called “unworthy urbanites who would loot and burn” because of their “lack of respect for the law.” See Dumm, “The New Enclosures,” 178–79. In the same anthology, see also Crenshaw and Peller, “Real Time/Real Injustice”; and Jerry G. Watts, “Reflections of the King Verdict.” In light of these and similar discussions, I have chosen to use the terms “uprising,” “civil disturbance,” and “riot” interchangeably in the context of this study—not only in order to avoid redundancy but also because I aim to suggest no political allegiance to any of these words. Moreover, in varying my use of terminology, I intend to stress the complexity of the events surrounding “the Rodney King incident.” As historian Mike Davis argues, the outbreak of violence, a “hybrid social revolt,” was at once a “revolutionary democratic protest,” a “riot,” and an “interethnic conflict.” These events, he contends, cannot, and should not, be reduced to “a single essence” through labels. Davis, “Uprising and Repression in L.A.,” 142. See also Kettle and Hodges, Uprising! 4 Recall that the white truck driver Reginald Denny was pulled from his vehicle, beaten by four men, and then left with his injuries in the South Central area of the city. After viewing the live footage of the beating on television, three African American residents of the area drove to the intersection, rescued Denny from the African American assailants, and drove him to a local hospital for treatment. African American, European American, Korean American, and Latino-owned businesses in the area were looted and torched. Violence occurred between and within ethnic groups. The civic unrest spread to other parts of the city including Koreatown, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Long Beach, and Culver City. Over the next two days, 2,383 people were injured, 12,000 people were arrested, 3,100 businesses were damaged, firemen responded to seven thousand fires, and 58 people died. Smith, Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992, 261. Mayor Tom Bradley imposed a city curfew, governor Pete Wilson mobilized the National Guard, and president George H. W. Bush declared the city

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a disaster area. The following year, police misconduct was investigated, police abuse continued, and several suits against police were settled. In February, another trial of the four policemen who beat Rodney King was mounted. In mid-April officers Briseno and Wind were acquitted, while officers Powell and Koon were found guilty of violating King’s civil rights in mid-April. In August, Damian Williams and Henry K. Watson were put on trial for beating Reginald Denny. They were acquitted of many of the counts against them, but Williams was found guilty on some counts and sentenced to prison. Smith, Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992, xxiv. Levin, Twilight. Ibid. The staged-for-video production was performed on a closed sound stage in front of cameras and a handful of production technicians rather than before a live theater audience; Smith enacts fewer characters in the video than in the play; and there are more costumes, props, and hairstyle changes in the video version. The video includes reels of the looting, violence, and protests that took place after the verdict was reached in the Simi Valley trial as well as archival interviews with key players in the drama; hip-hop music was dubbed over various sequences; and the director used camera motion to create moods and visualize character changes. The video version is a hybrid product that straddles the line between “objective” reportage and “subjective” fiction, between a live theater production and television. In Washington, after a performance at Ford’s Theater, Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen G. Breyer told Smith that every high school student in the United States should see the play. Their suggestions encouraged Smith to film the performance. She said she wanted the video “to get into schools, into community centers as inspiration to get people to talk about racial differences in America.” Weintraub, “A Chameleon Who Crosses Racial Divides,” 40. The idea I present here stands in contrast to the notion that performance creates utopian, if temporary, communities of belonging that Dolan theorizes in Utopia in Performance. Gordon and Newfield, Mapping Multiculturalism. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4–5; Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” 68. Gordon and Newfield, Mapping Multiculturalism, 5–6. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9.



23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Lippard, Mixed Blessings; Villa, Worlds in Collision. Lippard, Mixed Blessings, 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 4 and 14. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Italics mine. Jones, “The Agenda for the Nineties: Make it Multicultural.” Kellie Jones cites Jeff Jones, “San Francisco’s Prominent Arts Organizations: Why They Aren’t Equal Opportunity Employers” (unpublished paper, 25 March 1988); Pindell, “Statistics, Testimony and Supporting Documentation.” Jones, “The Agenda for the Nineties,” 6. Chagoya, “Responses to the Mission Questions,” 15; and van Proyen, “Responses to the Mission Questions,” 18–19. Chagoya, “Responses to the Mission Questions,” 15–16. Italics in original. The Decade Show; Gaines, The Theater of Refusal. The following year, the exhibition Asia/America, which featured contemporary art by artists born in Asia, was mounted at the Asia Society in New York. For more on the contributions the exhibit made to the multiculturalist art project and the politics of identity, see Chiu, Higa, and Min, One Way or Another. Graham-Dixon, “Art,” 18. Kimball, “Of Chocolate, Lard, and Politics,” 54. Heartney, “Identity Politics at the Whitney,” 42. Smith, “At the Whitney, a Biennial with a Social Conscience.” Ibid. Graham-Dixon, “Art,” 18. Ibid. Danto, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial,” 534. Ibid. Heartney, “Identity Politics at the Whitney,” 44. The Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary defines “political correctness” as “n. orig. U.S. advocacy of or conformity to politically correct views; politically correct language or behaviour” and “politically correct” as “adj. (a) appropriate to the prevailing political or social circumstances (in early use not as a fixed collocation); (b) spec. (orig. U.S., sometimes depreciative) conforming to a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters, usually characterized by the advocacy of approved causes or views, and often by the rejection of language, behaviour, etc., considered discriminatory or offensive (cf. CORRECT adj. Additions); abbreviated PC.” The phrases may have been, in their first instances, merely descriptive, outlining obliquely the ways in which major discourses, ideologies, and policies had shifted to incorporate more fully the

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

disenfranchised and dispossessed to society. More recently, “political correctness” and “politically correct” have taken on derogatory and derisive connotations wherein both liberals and conservatives employ them to dismiss things, ideas, and people as over-reaching and policing. Smith, “At the Whitney, a Biennial with a Social Conscience,” C27. Kimball, “Of Chocolate, Lard, and Politics,” 55. The phrase “culture war” refers to a political struggle over cultural institutions and discourses. In this instance, the author is likely referencing incidents that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts and also grants awarded to an exhibition of works by Robert Mapplethorpe, a documentary film by Marlon Riggs, as well as to the artists Andres Serrano, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and John Fleck. For more on this subject, see Bolton, Culture Wars. Ibid. Graham-Dixon, “Art,” 18. Danto, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial,” 536. Ibid. Heartney, “Identity Politics at the Whitney,” 44. Ibid., 46 and 47. Ibid., 47. Smith, “At the Whitney, a Biennial with a Social Conscience,” C27. Ross, “Preface,” 9. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 9–10. Sussman, “Coming Together in Parts,” 13. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 14–15. Golden, “What’s White . . . ?,” 27. Ibid., 27; West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” 19. Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation.” Ibid., 62, quoted from Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 154. Italics in original. Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” 65. Fusco, “Passionate Irreverence.” Golden, “What’s White . . . ?,” 35. Ibid.; and Golden, Freestyle, 14. Fires in the Mirror, which is based on ethnic and racial violence between Orthodox Jews and Caribbean Americans in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, had a successful run at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Fires in the Mirror are part of Smith’s play-series On the Road: A Search for American Character, begun in 1982. During the early plays, Smith developed her signature style. She conducted and recorded extensive interviews with various individuals regarding a particular event or person, created a narrative from the excerpted interviews, and then acted

75

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out the narrative and interview subjects on stage. Over the next ten years, Smith staged sixteen different plays, including Charlayne Hunter Gault in 1984, Building Bridges Not Walls in 1985, Voices of Bay Area Women in 1988, and Gender Bending in 1989, as part of the On the Road series. Like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the early plays were conducted at acting schools and universities where some kind of social-political crisis had occurred. Indeed, it was just one month after the turmoil ended and while her play Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities was in a successful run at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York that the Mark Taper Forum commissioned Smith to produce a play centering on sites and actors involved in the Los Angeles conflict. Likely, the Mark Taper Forum anticipated a (re) creation of Smith’s achievements with Fires in the Mirror. Tania Modleski also notes this dynamic in “Doing Justice to the Subjects,” 123. Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva have also explored the potential of a radical notion of mimicry. For another discussion of mimicry in relation to Smith’s work, see Modleski, “Doing Justice to the Subjects.” Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126. Ibid., 130. Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real’,” 363–64. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126. Ibid. Observation from Karin Higa offered during the question-and-answer session following my presentation of my research on Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles at University of Southern California, 25 January 2008. My thanks to Richard Meyer, Dorinne Kondo, Michael Renov, and Vanessa Schwartz for their thoughtful comments. Smith, Talk to Me, 52. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxvii. Thompson, “ ‘Is Race a Trope?’,” 128. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxvi. Thompson lodges a poststructuralist critique of that acting method, arguing that basing a character’s psychic life in that of the actor reinforces and naturalizes ideology and, thus, acts as an ideological state apparatus. Thompson, “ ‘Is Race a Trope?’” Smith, Talk to Me, 53. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxvii. Smith, Talk to Me, 53. Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 51. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxxi. Smith, Talk to Me, 294. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxvi. Italics in original. Smith, Talk to Me, 24. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.

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97 Similarly, artists such as Fred Wilson and Renée Green created installations with “found” objects. Their works, including Re: Claiming Egypt (1993) and Import/Export Funk Office (1992) respectively, shifted the practice of appropriation by being granted, with permission from museums, the opportunity to curate exhibition-cum-art installations with objects from museum storage. These works critiqued the cultural and material raiding that many museums took part in, questioned the politics and aesthetics of museum displays, attempted to wrest some authority from institutions, and pondered the manner in which culture and identity are represented on the individual and institutional levels. 98 Lewis, “The Circle of Confusion,” 55. 99 For more on the intersection of performance studies and anthropology and the revision of ethnographic practice in performance studies, see Conquergood, “Poetics, Play, Process, and Power”; “Performing as Moral Act”; and “Performance Studies.” 100 Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 63. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary.” 104 Ibid., 260. 105 Ibid. 106 Kroll, “A Woman for All Seasons,” 74. 107 Smith, Talk to Me, 24. 108 Kroll, “A Woman for All Seasons,” 74. 109 Lewis, “The Circle of Confusion,” 55. 110 Ibid., 58. 111 Smith, Talk to Me, 23. 112 Mixed-race or biracial individuals are the product of racial mixing, or “miscegenation,” a word which derives from the Greek “misce,” to mix, and “genus,” race. The child of an “interracial” couple is called “mulatto” from the Spanish word for “mule,” designating the third species that results when a horse and donkey mate. These phrases are derogatory. 113 This is the title of Werner Sollor’s book about mixed-race figures in literature. The phrase also appears in other cultural products by and about mixed-race figures and individuals. Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both. 114 Smith, Talk to Me, 22. 115 Armstrong and Fuller, “Media Killers.” 116 Though Smith’s ponytail suggests an air of laid-back elegance, the hairstyle is deliberate, and effort went into making it appear effortless. Likely, she underwent a process of straightening that can be done in one of two ways. For permanent straightening, her stylist would apply strong “relaxing” chemicals to her hair. Next, her chemically straightened but still slightly wavy hair would be blow-dried or flat-ironed, curled with irons, and, finally, styled in the ponytail. To temporarily straighten her curly hair, her stylist would under-

take a similarly time-consuming and arduous process. The stylist would blow a stream of hot air from a high-powered hair dryer onto strands of Smith’s hair while combing and brushing the curls out of her wet tresses. Next, a hot flat-iron or pressing-comb would be run through her still wavy but mostly straight hair until it is “bone” straight. Finally, the stylist would use hot curling irons to style the straightened hair. 117 During the reenactments, Smith wears six different hairstyles as well as fancy hats, baseball caps, and kerchiefs to signify different characters. However for the majority of the film, she wears one of two styles—one polished and one unkempt. In the polished style, Smith’s hair is slicked back in a neat and tight French braid. She wears this style in the segments that lead to reenactments of the civic unrest. Though the polished style seems to fade away and focus attention on the actor’s face and expressions, it signifies different things about different characters. On Smith-as-Rudy Salas, the style communicates seriousness; on Smith-as-Daryl Gates, it suggests the regimented style of a lifelong police officer; and on Smith-as-Elaine Young, it comes off as professional and manicured. By contrast, Smith wears the unkempt style—hair pulled into a French braid that is messy and in disarray—during moments of violence and when characters are feeling strong emotions. The style communicates the fear and anxiety Smith-as-Shelby Coffey felt at the start of the riots; it suggests the emotional instability brought on by sadness in Smith-as-Mrs. June Park; and it conveys the sketchy guilt of Smith-as-Daryl Gates. The smootheddown style implies that things are tolerable, and the messy style symbolizes things falling apart. The bottom line is that Smith uses these hairstyles because they are open to psychological projections on the part of the viewer. Four characters were singled out from the mass of other characters with individual hairstyles perhaps in order to honor the women’s courage, commitment, and outspokenness. When acting as Angela King, the aunt of Rodney King, Smith wears her straightened hair in eight to ten braids that fall freely around her head. As Elvira Evers, the actor wears her straightened hair in a loose ponytail, and a band keeps stray tendrils away from her face. To portray Jessye Norman, Smith wears a theatrical wig that approximates the opera singer’s signature mane of wavy hair. Maria, Juror #7, is individuated by an elaborate up-do. For Maria, Smith wore her straightened hair pulled away from her face and into an elegant bun. 118 Here I am using “natural” to denote a hairstyle that has not been processed with chemicals or heat. Having said that, all hair, regardless of its texture, is processed in some way whether through combing, applying product, or arranging. See Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics.” 119 On 1 May 2004, I had the opportunity to attend a performance staged by Anna Deavere Smith. She was invited to perform at the dinner for a conference called “Community/Diversity/Difference” that was sponsored by “alumni of color” groups at Stanford University. Perhaps because Smith wanted to show her solidarity with the large group of people of color for whom she was per-

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120 121

122

123 124

125

126 127 128 129 130 131

132 133 134

forming, she wore her hair in its naturally curly state rather than straightened. Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 31–32. Despite the apparent ease of natural hairstyles, they take considerable time and effort to maintain. In order to maintain an Afro, for instance, the wearer has to comb out, and sometimes blow dry, the curls to separate them, apply oils, and continually groom the style. Similarly, individuals who wear braided styles must sit for hours each time they get their hair plaited, and then they must apply oil and conditioners to protect the braids. Kobena Mercer “outs” these and other natural hairstyles in “Black Hair/Style Politics.” The associations of straight hair to professionalism remain trenchant. One need only look to the recent controversy surrounding statements made by a Glamour magazine editor. She told the meeting of women lawyers at the Cleary Gottlieb firm, several of whom were African American, that “natural” hairstyles are a “Glamour don’t” because they are “inappropriate” in a professional setting. See Chen, “Bad Hair Day.” Smith, Talk to Me, 4. One could argue that the Washington political machine has a demonstrated history of treating women, regardless of their ethnic, class, racial, or sexual orientation, poorly. The luncheon seems to have taken place in a private home, as personal effects and family pictures are placed prominently around the room. Daryl Gates, Paul Parker, Anna Deavere Smith, Ruben Martinez (identified as “Author/ Journalist”), Stanley K. Sheinbaum, and Elaine Kim (identified as “author”) are some of the participants. Others are not identified within the space of the film. Smith, Talk to Me, 110; Fires in the Mirror, xxv. Italics in original. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxv. Italics in original. Smith, “Not So Special Vehicles,” 84. Smith, Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992, xxi. Smith, Talk to Me, 160. For an insightful discussion of “monopolylogues,” including Jane Wagner’s and Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Broadway version 1985, video 1991, and Broadway revival 2000); Danny Hoch’s Some People (1994) and Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop (1998); and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), see Dolan, “Finding Our Feet in Another’s Shoes.” A comparative study of Smith’s work vis-à-vis Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing (1990); Whoopi Goldberg’s Spook Show (1983) and Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway (1985); and Sarah Jones’s Bridge and Tunnel (1994 and 1996) and Surface Transit (2000) would likely yield important assessments. Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxxvii–xxxviii. Italics in original. Brustein, “P.C.—or Not P.C.,” 29. Ibid.

135 Ibid. I submit that Brustein’s comment that Smith is an “extremely handsome young woman” was motivated by a complex mixture of racialism and sexism. 136 Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 50. 137 Ibid. 138 West, “Foreword,” xvii. 139 Ibid., xvi. Italics in original. 140 Smith, “Not So Special Vehicles,” 87. 141 Ibid. 142 Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxxvii. 143 Smith, “Not So Special Vehicles,” 87. 144 Smith, Fires in the Mirror, xxxvii. 145 Martin, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 46. 146 Armstrong and Fuller, “Media Killers.” 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 Smith, Talk to Me, 222. 154 Davis, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 40.

Notes to Chapter Four: Nikki S. Lee 1 The process of entering language, and thus discourse, into the public sphere is discussed in Hall and Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism.” 2 Steven A. Holmes, “Panel Balks at Multiracial Census Category.” 3 Ibid. 4 Holmes, “People Can Claim One or More Races on Federal Forms,” 1. 5 Ibid. 6 Holmes, “Panel Balks at Multiracial Census Category,” 12. 7 Ibid.; and Barr and Fletcher, “U.S. Proposes Multiple Racial Identification for 2000 Census,” A01. 8 Holmes, “Panel Balks at Multiracial Census Category,” 12. For more on this topic, see Williams, Mark One or More. 9 Guinier and Torres, The Miner’s Canary; Bonilla-Silva, The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America; and Pollock, Colormute. See Joseph, “ ‘Tyra Banks Is Fat’.” 10 Guinier and Torres, The Miner’s Canary, 17. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Bonilla-Silva, The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America, 4. 13 Ibid., 26. 14 Ibid. Here he paraphrases Gray, Liberalism. 15 Golden, “Post . . . ,” 14–15.

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Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (1968). Golden, “Post . . . ,” 14. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15. Cotter, “Shaking Up a Harlem Museum,” E1. Ibid. Ibid. Sims, “Foreword and Acknowledgments,” 12. Clifford, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously.” Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Kwon, “Experience vs. Interpretation.” Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Kwon, “Experience vs. Interpretation,” 75. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 87. Kwon identifies Lee “as part of a subcultural group (Korean American).” Ibid., 87. Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer.” Ibid., 175. Ibid. Ibid., 179–80. Ibid., 203. Kaplan, “Performing Community,” 173; and Goldberg, “Only Part of the Story: Nikki S. Lee in Conversation with Rose Lee Goldberg,” 49. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 8. Trebay, “Shadow Play,” 82. Goldberg, “Only Part of the Story,” 50. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 11. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 13. Berger, “Picturing Whiteness,” 55. Hamilton, “Dressing the Part Is Her Art,” 8. For another discussion of Lee’s work within the tradition of street photography, see Brougher, “The Camera in the Street.” Greenough, “Introduction,” 2. Ibid. Ibid. Discussion with artist, 25 March 2008. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969.” Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 8. Rosenbaum, “Face Forward/Looking Black,” 14. According to Rosenbaum, the Hip Hop Project was partially supported by the Bronx Museum of Art’s Col-

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laborative Art Project (CAP) program. Rosenbaum e-mailed with Lydia Yee to verify this information. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 9. Dalton, “Look at Me,” 47. Ibid. Ibid. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 11. Ibid., 13. In his discussion of this photograph, Derek Conrad Murray identifies the figures surrounding the artist as members of the rap group Mobb Deep. For more on this, see his article “Hip-Hop vs. High Art,” 15–16. Jarmusch, Ghost Dog; Christine Y. Kim, Black Belt, exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003; Beatty, Tuff; and Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters. Consider the protest by Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) in 2001 against the Fox television network program MadTV due to the character “Mrs. Swan,” a nail salon worker, who was played by the European American actress Alex Borstein. See Yayoi Lena Winfrey, “Yellowface: Asians on White Screens,” available at the web site for Imdiversity.com, www .imdiversity.com. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 11. Trebay, “Shadow Play,” 82. Ibid. Ibid. Cannon, “Identity Crises,” 26–27. Ibid. Lee, Projects, 100. Lee, “Conversation with Nikki S. Lee.” Lee, Projects, 101. Ibid. Lee, “Conversation with Nikki S. Lee.” Cannon, “Identity Crises,” 27. Lee, Projects, 107. Lee, “Conversation with Nikki S. Lee”; and Lee, Projects, 15. Lee, Parts, 49. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Lee, Projects, 104. An evaluation of Lee’s work as “Occidentalist”—as partaking in and perpetuating iconographic narratives of the West, a suggestion by Tim Barringer—may yield interesting results. Lee, Parts, 49. Hamilton, “Dressing the Part Is Her Art,” 8.

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Lee, “Conversation with Nikki S. Lee.” Ibid. Ibid. Lee, Parts, 50. Ibid. Hall and Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism.” Hall and Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism,” quoting Ouellette, “Our Turn Now,” 119. Tasker and Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism. Ibid., 2. Dalton, “Look at Me,” 47. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 15. Ibid., 13. Lee, Projects, 13. Trebay, “Shadow Play,” 82. Ibid.; and Cannon, “Identity Crises,” 26. Trebay, “Shadow Play,” 82; and Cannon, “Identity Crises,” 26. Ferguson, “Let’s Be Nikki,” 13. Lee, “Conversation with Nikki S. Lee.” Ibid. Given the history of conflict between Japan and Korea, the notoriously poor treatment of Korean immigrant-workers in Japan, and the ostracizing of Amerasian children, particularly the offspring of African American servicemen, following the Korean War, the veracity of Lee’s statement is questionable. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Goldberg, “Only Part of the Story,” 50. Considering Nikki S. Lee’s position as abject would likely yield a complicated analysis, as would an investigation of her photographs as instantiating her figure/self as a locus of disdain. My thanks to Alex Nemerov for suggesting this avenue of inquiry.

Notes to the Conclusion 1 Interestingly, the candidates’ partners, Michelle Obama and president Bill Clinton, were also subjected to such essentializing characterizations. For a discussion of Obama’s efforts to control her persona, see Swarns, “First Lady in Control of Her Persona.” 2 The author’s use of the phrase “out of fashion” is interesting given the fashion scrutiny to which the “minority” candidates and their spouses, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Sarah and Todd Palin, were subjected. Directing attention to clothing and away from political platforms and actions was certainly an effort to undermine the



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candidates. Genocchio, “Angry, Funny and Concerned about Identity.” Italics mine. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Raimundi-Ortiz, Topic One: Contemporary Art. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Piper’s video Cornered (1991), in which she assumed the dress, tone, and demeanor of a broadcast journalist to confront viewers about their racial background, must have been a source of inspiration. Raimundi-Ortiz seems to have learned considerable lessons from Piper. Her decision to place her didactic videos on YouTube is very much in keeping with Piper’s dispersal of her advertisements in the Village Voice as well as her mounting her performances on the street and outside the gallery/museum setting, for she is guaranteed to encounter an art-world and non-art-world audience. One look at the video of the salsa dancing lessons Raimundi-Ortiz offered at the Bronx Museum shows that Piper’s Funk Lessons was also influential (available on YouTube). Raimundi-Ortiz, Topic One: Contemporary Art. Piper has a strong presence on the Internet, hosting a web site devoted to her art and philosophical practices. That she recently self-published her multivolume philosophical treatise Rationality and the Structure of the Self (2009) on her web site rather than publishing it in book format with Cambridge University Press (who had accepted the text, see the article published 19 February 2009 at the web site of artforum.com) demonstrates that she understands the Internet to be an alternate distribution method, like those she employed in the 1960s and 1970s to bypass the gallery-museum industrial complex. Web site of Erica Lord, http://ericalord.com, accessed on 3 April 2009. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See artists Audrey Chan, Jill Pangallo, and Jennifer Reeder, whose work also continues the tradition of enacting “others” that is explored here.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations; those followed by “n” indicate endnotes. “AA Meeting” (Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles), 151–55 accents. See language, speech, and accents Acconci, Vito, 37–38, 62, 214 The Adventures of a Nurse (Antin), 115 affinity-­based, depoliticized model of identity, 217–18 African Americans. See entries at black African art, 246n10 AFRI-­COBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), 36 Afro-­Asian celebrities, 219–20 agency: autobiographical component of works and, 23; black feminism and, 97; Lee on, 221–23; mimicry and, 156; Piper on, 44; Piper’s Mythic Being and, 54 “The Agenda for the Nineties: Make It Multicultural” (Jones), 142–43 A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery, New York, 100–103, 257n56 Albright, Madeleine, 10

American school of art, 245n10 “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporating” (Schechner), 166 anthropologist language, Piper and, 48–49. See also ethnographic turn The Anti-­Aesthetic (Foster), 84–85 antihumanism, and Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 153–54 Antin, Eleanor: audience and, 103, 126– 33; the Ballerina, 114–15; blackface and, 103–5, 109–12, 115–16; the Black Movie Star, 98, 115–16, 259n116; cultural and discursive milieus and, 7, 83–87; dialogue strategy and, 97–98; feminism and, 90, 99–100; letter to the editor by, in Chrysalis, 98–100; mission statement of, 98; the Nurse, 115; Orientalist critique and, 121–26; Pocahontas, 88, plate 4; as post‑ conceptualist, 86–87, 216; raceparanoia of, 130–31, 261n154; return of, to whiteness, 132–33; rhetorical persona and, 22–23; self-­doubt of,

Antin, Eleanor (cont.) 104–5; signs shortcircuited by, 133– 34; as storyteller, 82 Antin, Eleanor, works of: The Adventures of a Nurse, 115; The Ballerina and the Bum, 115; Before the Revolution, 103; Being Antinova, 81, 87–90, 109, 116–18, 117, 118, 126–33, 255n2, 261n140; “Black Ballerina” series, 116–18, 117, 118; Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 112; Caught in the Act, 115; Choreography, 115; From the Archives of Modern Art, 255n2; Help! I’m in Seattle, 255n2; The King of Solano Beach, 37, 113–14; The Nurse and Hijackers, 115; Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 80–81, 103, 124–26, plates 6–8; Who Cares about a Ballerina?, 255n2. See also Antinova, Eleanora Antinova, Eleanora (persona, Antin): ballerina line drawings and, 116–18, 117, 118; Ballets Russes and critique of Orientalism and, 122–26; beginnings of, 255n2; Being Antinova (book), 81, 87–90, 109, 116–18, 117, 118, 126–33, 255n2, 261n140; as blackface, 103–11; critics on, 111–12, 127–29; discursive milieu of, 7, 84, 86–87; friends’ reactions to, 118–21, 129; Jolson’s The Jazz Singer and, 106; on New York sidewalk, 79–80, 80; performance categories of, 21; as Pocahontas, 88; “racist waiter” incident with friend Carrie and, 118–21; Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 80–81, 103, 124–26, plates 6–8; staged and candid photographs of, 87–90, 89, plate 4 “Anti-­Semitism in the Women’s Movement” (Pegrebin), 95 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 91–92 appropriation as strategy, 149–50, 247n14

“Art as Catalysis” (Piper), 41–42, 66–67 Artforum, 70–71 The Artifact Piece (Luna), 165 art institutions. See museum and gallery system “The Artist as Ethnographer” (Foster), 210–11 art movements: black arts, 33–37, 41, 203, 246n6; conceptual, 38, 61–62, 86–87, 214–15, 250n32; feminist, 83–86, 90, 245n6; identity politics art, 8, 47, 111–12, 235–37, 244n4; minimalism, 65; “Negro” art, 246n10; postmodern, 86; women’s, 33–37, 41 art publications, communication among artists within, 70–71 Asia/America exhibition (1994), 265n38 Asian and Asian-­American identity, 218–25, 273n63. See also Orientalism “Ask Chuleta: Contemporary Art” (Raimundi-­Ortiz), 236–39 Association of Multiethnic Americans, 192 audiences: Antin and, 103, 126–33; critical audience, internalization of, 67–69; feminist collectives and, 90–91; identity, performativity and, 19–21; liminality modeled for, 18–19; male body and, 38; phenomenology and, 64–65; Pindell’s Free, White, and 21 and, 103; Piper, double consciousness, and subject/object divide, 67–74; Piper and art world vs. specialized viewers, 69–70; Piper’s Catalysis and, 42; Piper’s Mythic Being and, 28, 46, 54–57, 66, 69–74; Raimundi-­Ortiz’s “Ask Chuleta” and, 237–39; Smith’s mediation of subjects and, 179–87 Auerbach, David, 55, 57 authenticity: blackness and, 50, 107– 11, 171–79; documentary photogra-

phy and, 213–14; identity and, 10–11; Lee and overvaluing of, 210; mimesis and, 155–56; Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles and, 155, 171–79 authority: Antin and destabilization of, 87; ethnographic, 164–65, 208–12 autobiographical component, 23 autonomy: black feminism and, 94, 96–97; multiculturalism and, 138; Piper’s Catalysis and, 42–44; Piper’s Mythic Being and, 54 Avalanche, 70 Baker, Josephine, 117, 121 The Ballerina (persona, Antin), 114–15 The Ballerina and the Bum (Antin), 115 Ballets Russes, 122–24, 123, plate 5 Banes, Sally, 128–29 Beauvoir, Simone de, 34, 59, 94 Before the Revolution (Antin), 103 Being Antinova (Antin), 81, 87–90, 109, 116–18, 117, 118, 126–33, 255n2, 261n140 Benglis, Lynda, 70 Benhabib, Seyla, 20 Berger, Maurice, 212–13 Bernhardt, Sarah, 260n139 Bey, Twilight, 168 “Beyond the Pale” (Bhabha), 149 Bhabha, Homi, 149–50, 156, 248n48 binary system of identification, 10, 15, 116 biological narratives of identity, 246n11 biracial and multiracial individuals, 170–71, 192, 268n112 Birnbaum, Dara, 85 black arts movement, 33–37, 41, 203, 245n6 “Black” as self-­identification, 247n14. See also blackness “Black Ballerina” series (Antin), 116– 18, 117, 118 blackface: by Antin, 103–5, 109–12,

115–16; by Jewish performers, 103– 11; by Lee, 218, 220; minstrelsy and, 14–15, 16, 57 black feminism, 92–94, 96–97 “A Black Feminist Statement” (Combahee River Collective), 92–94 black males and masculinity: Antin’s Antinova and, 132; Piper’s Mythic Being and, 47–57, 75–76 the Black Movie Star (persona, Antin), 98, 115–16, 259n116 blackness: Antin and, 98, 105, 112; Antin’s “racist waiter” incident and, 119–20; Asian Americans and African Americans and, 219–20; black people separated from trope of, 11; “blaxploitation films” and, 50; collective identification, 32–33; double consciousness and, 67–68; foundational narratives and, 10–11; Jewish identity and, 105–6; minstrelsy and exaggerated notions of, 14–15; performances of, 12; photo of author’s mother and, 1–3; politics of identity assembled around, 5–6; post-­black discourse, 112, 202–5; “slave” and, 243n2; Smith and, 173–77; transmission and adoption, availability of, x, 111. See also passing black power movement, 33, 36 black/white color contrast, Piper’s use of, 51 black woman stereotype, 116–18 Blade Runner (film), ix–x blaxploitation films, 50, 116 Bloom, Lisa, 112, 259n123 bodies and bodily experiences: eye color, 241; identity discourses and, 17–19; male artist bodies and audience, 38; Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology and, 65; Piper and body image, 71; Piper’s body-­oriented practice, 40–41; Piper’s in-­body experience vs. “other” surveying

Index

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bodies and bodily experiences (cont.) the body, 68–69; violence and, 20–21. See also hairstyles Bogle, Donald, 50, 116 Bonilla-­Silva, Eduardo, 199, 201–2 boundary crossings: Bhabha’s in-­ between spaces, 149; binary system and, 10; cross-­dressing and drag, 15, 16; instability at foundation of, 57–58; Piper’s experience of gender through, 63–64; power and, 16. See also blackface; passing Bowles, John, 253n92 Breyer, Stephen G., 264n9 Brice, Fanny, 259n114 Briseno, Theodore J., 136, 264n4 Brooks, Van Wyck, 245n10 Broude, Norma, 83 Broyard, Anatole, 10 Bruce, Lenny, 108 Brustein, Robert, 183, 271n135 Building Bridges Not Walls (Smith), 267n74 Burden, Chris, 37–38 Butler, Judith, 7, 9, 19, 59, 158 Cade Bambara, Toni, 91–92 camp, 15, 125–26 Canepa, Anna, 89 Cannon, Paul Lee, 221, 229 caricature, 183–84 Carmichael, Stokely, 109–10 Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (Antin), 112 Catalysis series (Piper), 42–44, 43, 62 Caught in the Act (Antin), 115 Cavaliere, Barbara, 127 census, ethnoracial categories in, 191–93 Césaire, Aimé, 33 Chagoya, Enrique, 143 chameleonism and Lee, 190–91 Charlayne Hunter Gault (Smith), 267n74 Chicago, Judy, 34, 36, 70, 83–84

Choreography (Antin), 115 Chrysalis letter to the editor (Antin), 98–100 Chuleta (persona, Raimundi-­Ortiz), 236–39 civil rights movement, 5–6, 30–33 Cleaver, Eldridge, 116 Cleaver, Kathleen, 116 Clifford, James, 49, 163–67, 208–9 Clinton, Bill, 274nn1–2 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 233–34, 274n2 close-­read method, 23–24 clothing. See specific performers and characters Cocteau, Jean, 124 Coffey, Shelby (persona, Smith), 269n117 collective identification, 32–33 Collins, Lisa Gail, 33 colonialism, 143–44, 156, 246n11 “color,” persons of, and multiculturalism, 140–41, 143 colorblindness, ideology of, 199–202 “colored,” Antin’s use of term, 129–30 “colorline,” problem of, 4 Combahee River Collective, 92–94, 244n4, 256n53 “Coming Together in Parts” (Sussman), 147–48 Community/Diversity/Difference conference (2004), 269n119 conceptual art: Antin and, 86–87; documentary photography and, 214– 15; Piper and, 38, 61–62, 250n32 consciousness-­raising: civil rights movement and, 6, 32–33; Jewish feminists and, 95–96; Moraga and, 92; Piper and, 250n33 control: hair and, 171–74; Lee and, 216, 231; Morris on phenomenology and, 65; Piper on, 68–69; submissive view position and, 66 core samples, 24

Corn, Wanda, 245n10 Cornered (Piper), 55, 275n14 Cotter, Holland, 205 Craft, William, x, 56 Crary, Jonathan, 80 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 113 Crimp, Douglas, 85 “Criteria of Negro Art” (Du Bois), 246n10 cross-­dressing, 15, 16 cultural nationalism: Afros and, 173; American art and, 245n10; black arts movement and, 33–34; identity politics vs., 8; post-­black and, 202 Culture Wars, 146, 149, 266n51 Dalton, Jennifer, 217, 226 Damon, Maria, 108–10 Danieli, Fidel, 128 Danto, Arthur, 145–46 Davis, Angela, 116 Davis, Mike, 263n3 dematerialized objects, 62–63, 215–16. See also conceptual art Denny, Reginald, 263n4 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 124, 260n126. See also Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (Antin) Dialectics of Isolation exhibition (A.I.R. Gallery, New York, 1980), 100–103, 257n56 dialogue-­staging strategy, 97–98, 101 Diamond, Elin, 156 difference: in 2008 presidential campaign, 234; anthropology and, 49; feminism and, 97; Lee’s Projects series and, 223–24, 227–30; Lorde on, 94; new cultural politics of, 148–49; postmodernism and, 85. See also otherness “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” (Owens), 85–86, 134 disempowerment: black feminism and,

93; colorblindness and, 201; identity politics and, 5; Piper and, 54, 58 distribution of performance: through Internet and viral technologies, 238–42, 275n14, 275n17; Piper and, 28, 62, 69 Dobson, Tamara, 116 document and documentary: Antin and, 86–89, 89; conceptualism and, 214–15; ethnographic turn against authority of, 163–67; Lee and, 212– 17; Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles as self-­reflexive documentary, 167; social documentary photography, 213 Dolan, Jill, 262n1 Donaldson, Jeff, 35, 36 double consciousness theory, 67–68 drag, 15, 16 The Drag Queen Project (Lee), 193 Drawing of Philip (Piper), 251n45 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 67–68, 246n10 Dumm, Thomas L., 263n3 Dyer, Richard, 11, 50–51, 112–13, 248n48 East Meets West (a.k.a. The Expeditionary Series) (Tseng), 198, plate 13 Eleanora Antinova. See Antinova, Eleanora emasculation trope, in Piper’s Mythic Being, 52–55 essentialism: in 2008 presidential campaign, 234, 274n1; critiques of, 7, 9; feminist art and, 83; multiculturalism and, 140–41; “strategic,” 245n7 ethnographic turn, 163–67, 208–12, 216–17 Evers, Elvira (persona, Smith), 269n117 The Expeditionary Series (a.k.a. East Meets West) (Tseng), 198, plate 13 eye color, 241 Feldman, Ronald, 80, 129 femininity: antifeminism and post‑ feminist, 225–26; Antin’s Ballerina

Index

296|297

femininity (cont.) and, 114–15; Antin’s Carving and, 112; black woman stereotype and, 116–18; Piper and performative identity of, 59–60 feminism: Antin and, 90, 99–100; black, 92–94, 96–97; Jewish identity and, 95–96, 259n123; mimesis and, 156; multiple-­identification statements of collectives, 90–97; Pindell’s Free, White, and 21, 100–103; postmodernism and, 85–86 feminist art, 83–86, 90, 245n6 feminist persona-­play artists, 37 Ferguson, Russell, 212, 217, 220, 227, 230 film: Blade Runner, ix–x; blaxploitation films, 50, 116; as performance, 21; self-­reflexive documentary films, 167 Fires in the Mirror (Smith), 155, 262n1, 266n74 Food for the Spirit (Piper), 44, 62, 254n112, plate 2 Fore, Dan C., 95 Foster, Hal, 84–85, 210–11 Fredrickson, Laurel, 250n40 Free, White, and 21 (Pindell), 100–103 Freestyle exhibition (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 150–51 From the Archives of Modern Art (Antin), 255n2 Fuller, Kevin, 185 Funk Lessons (Piper), 275n14 Fusco, Coco, 149–50, 164–65 galleries and museums. See museum and gallery system Garber, Marjorie, 15 Garrard, Mary D., 83 Gates, Daryl, 176 Gates, Daryl (persona, Smith), 180–83, 182, 187, 269n117 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 142 gaze, of Lee, 227

gender: Antin and, 113–15; black woman stereotype and, 116–18; gender identification in art publications, 70–71; Piper’s boundary crossing and experience of, 63–64. See also femininity; feminism; masculinity; Mythic Being series (Piper) Gender Bending (Smith), 267n74 Genocchio, Benjamin, 235–36 Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, 264n9 Gober, Robert, 147 Goldberg, RoseLee, 128–29, 212, 230 Golden, Thelma, 148–49, 150, 202–6 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 164–65 Gordon, Avery F., 138–40 Graham-­Dixon, Andrew, 145–46 Gray, Herman, 52 Green, Renée, 268n97 Grier, Pam, 116 Guinier, Lani, 199–201 Gutman, James, 251n60 Habermas, Jürgen, 84 hairstyles: African American practices, 268–70nn116–22; Piper’s Afro wig in The Mythic Being, 47, 60; Piper’s description of black man in park, 49; politics of, 172–73; in Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 160, 172–74, 177, 268–70nn116–19 Hall, Elaine J., 225 Hall, Stuart, 7, 9–10, 247n17 Harper, Frances, x Heartney, Eleanor, 145–46 The Hebrews (Antin), 125, plate 7 Heidegger, Martin, 149 Help! I’m in Seattle (Antin), 255n2 Hershman, Lynn, 37 Hine, Lewis, 213 The Hip Hop Project (Lee), 216–18, 220, 272n54, plate 16 The Hispanic Project (Lee), 227, 228 Hogu, Barbara Jones, 36 Home Girls (Smith), 96

hooks, bell, 52–53 Howe, Irving, 258nn93–94 Hudson, Rock, 10 humanism: Lee and, 190; psychological realism and, 158; in Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 137–38, 153–55, 183; universal, 8, 17, 245n7 humor: Antin and ethnic humor, 120– 21; and camp in Antin’s ballet costumes, 125–26 Hun, Mrs. (persona, Smith), 185–86 Husserl, Edmund, 65 hypermasculine trope, in Piper’s Mythic Being, 52–55 identity, definitions of, 246n13 identity crisis: in Blade Runner, x; passing and, x identity narratives: audience and performance of, 19–21; binary system of, 10, 15, 116; biological and colonial, 246n11; bodies excluded from, 17–18; census categories and, 191–93; ethnographic turn and, 163–67, 208–12, 216–17; exclusion and homogenization and, 244n3; fixity of, 12; foundational, 9–11; Kant on distance from oneself and, 64; multiculturalism and, 138–51; performed in passing, minstrelsy, cross-­dressing, and drag, 12–17; Piper and performativity of identity, 59–64; Piper’s understanding of societal influence in shaping, 58–59; Piper’s use of, 39–40; post-­black or postethnic, 112; self-­identifications, constitution of, 9; single-­identity categories and, 247n17; social movements and collective identity, 32–33. See also specific narratives, such as blackness identity politics: backlash against, 7–8; critiques of, 245n7; multiculturalism and, 146; politics of identity vs.,

5, 244n4; in Raimundi-­Ortiz’s “Ask Chuleta,” 237. See also politics of identity identity politics art, 8, 47, 111–12, 235–37, 244n4 in-­between spaces, Bhabha on, 149 Incidents in the Life of a Slave (Jacobs), x, 56 individual merit and postidentity discourse, 203–4 Internet, 238–42, 275n14, 275n17 interstitial space. See liminal or interstitial space Invisible Man (Ellison), 132 Iola Leroy (Harper), x Irwin, Irwin, 128 Jacob, Harriet, x, 56 The Jazz Singer (film), 106 Jefferson, Thomas, 179 Jewish identity: Antin and, 109–12; Bernhardt (Sarah) and, 260n139; blackface performers and, 105–11; feminism and, 95–96, 259n123; Orientalism and, 260n128 Jindal, Piyush “Bobby,” 235 Johnson, E. Patrick, 11 Jolson, Al, 106 Jones, Jeff, 142 Jones, Kellie, 142–43 Judd, Donald, 65 Kahlo, Frida, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 64 Kaplan, Louise, 211 Karenga, Maulana Ron, 34 Karsavina, Tamara, 260n134 Kelly, Mary, 83–84 Kennedy, Peter, 249n3 Kiefer, Anselm, 142 Kimball, Roger, 145–46, 266n51 King, Angela (persona, Smith), 269n117 King, Rodney G., 136, 151. See also Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith)

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The King of Solano Beach (Antin), 37, 113–14 Klapp, Orrin E., 50 Koon, Stacey C., 136, 264n4 Kruger, Barbara, 86 Kwon, Miwon, 209–10 “label,” 203 Lacy, Suzanne, 37 language, speech, and accents: individuality marked through speech by Smith, 159, 161; Jewish performers in blackface and, 107–10; Smith’s “characterizing voice,” 183, 186–87; Smith’s use of pronouns, 178–79 Lee, Josephine, 20–21, 248n48 Lee, Nikki S.: Asian-­American identity and, 218–25; conceptualism, postconceptualism, and, 216; cultural and discursive milieus, 7–8; as postfeminist, 225–26; postidentity ideology and, 199, 206, 217; privileged position of, 230–31; rhetorical persona, 23; shallow engagement of, 226 Lee, Nikki S., works of. See Projects series (Lee) The Lesbian Project (Lee), 225 L’Esclave (Antin), 125, plate 6 Levin, Kim, 127 Levin, Marc, 137 LeWitt, Sol, 61, 74 life performance, 21–22, 81, 103. See also specific performances liminal or interstitial space: Antin and, 83, 121; Lee and, 226, 231; modeled for audiences, 18–19; multiculturalism and, 149; Piper and, 28, 76; Smith and, 137, 163, 187 Lippard, Lucy: Antin and, 104; conceptual art and, 61–62; on conceptual art, 86, 214–15; interview with Piper, 42, 44; Mixed Blessings, 140–41; women’s art movement and, 34–35 Locke, Alain, 246n10

Lopez, Yolanda, 143 Lord, Erica, 239–41 Lorde, Audre, 94 Lott, Eric, 14, 57, 105, 257n68 Luna, James, 165 MadTV (Fox), 273n63 mail, distribution of works by, 62 Mailer, Norman, 257n63 Malcolm X, 33–34 male artists, 37–38 “mantra,” of Piper, 46 Mapping Multiculturalism (Gordon and Newfield), 138–40 Maria, Juror #7 (persona, Smith), 151– 55, 269n117, plate 9 Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 135, 262n1, 267n75 Martin, Carol, 183 masculinity: hypermasculine and emasculated stereotypes in Piper’s Mythic Being, 52–55; Piper’s enacting of iconographic behaviors, 63; Piper’s “The Mythic Being: I Embody” and, 47 master narratives, questioning of, 163 “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (Lorde), 94 Mayer, Rosemary, 62, 250n40 Media Action Network for Asian Americans, 273n63 mediator persona of Smith, 175–79, 176, 177 Mercer, Kobena, 50 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 65 Mezzrow, Mezz, 107–8, 258n84 “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-­ Real’” (Diamond), 156 mimesis vs. mimicry, 155–57 mimicry in Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 155–58, 162, 183 The Miner’s Canary (Guinier and Torres), 199–201

minimalism, 65 minstrelsy, blackface, 14–15, 16, 57 Mixed Blessings (Lippard), 140–41 mixed-­race or biracial individuals, 170– 71, 192, 268n112 Mobb Deep, 273n61 “model minority” status, 219 Molesworth, Helen, 83–84 “monopolylogues,” 135, 262n1 Montano, Linda, 37 Moraga, Cherríe, 91–92 Morris, Robert, 65, 214 multiculturalism: Gordon and Newfield’s Mapping Multiculturalism, 138–40; Lippard’s Mixed Blessings, 140–41; Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles and, 151–55, 182–83; Whitney Biennial Exhibition (1993), 144–50; Worlds in Collision symposia, 141–44 multiracial individuals, 170–71, 192, 268n112 Murray, Derek Conrad, 273n61 museum and gallery system: Antin’s subversion of, 86; cultural and material raiding of, 268n97; multiculturalism and, 142–43; Piper’s circumvention of, 62; Raimundi-­Ortiz’s Chuleta on “white-­box people,” 236–39. See also distribution of performance “My Slave Name” (Piper), 251n45 Mythic Being series (Piper): Antin’s King of Solano Beach compared to, 113; audience and distribution of, 28; “Cruising White Women,” 26, 27–28, 251n60; cultural and discursive milieus of, 6–7; “Cycle I,” 45, 53, 72, 73; “Getting Back,” 30–31, 214–15, 251n60; “I Am the Locus,” 74–77, 75; as identity politics art, 29–30; ideology, participation in, 29; “I Embody,” 47–55, plate 1; “It Doesn’t Matter,” 65–67, plates 3a–c; “I/You (Her),” 59–64, 60–61; in Kennedy’s Other

Than Art’s Sake, 249n3; and self as subject and object, 68–69; as street performance, 21; Village Voice advertisements, 28, 44–47, 53, 69–74, 72, 73 National Endowment for the Arts, 266n51 Neal, Larry, 34–35 Negra, Diane, 226 “Negro” art, 246n10 new cultural politics of difference, 148–49 “New Ethnicities” (Hall), 10, 247n17 Newfield, Christopher, 138–40 New Negro movement, 245n10 Nichols, Bill, 167 Nightingale, Eleanor (persona, Antin), 259n115 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 260n134 Norman, Jessye (persona, Smith), 269n117 nudity and race, 254n112 the Nurse (persona, Antin), 115 The Nurse and Hijackers (Antin), 115 Obama, Barack, 233–34, 274n2 Obama, Michelle, 274nn1–2 objectivity: Antin and, 87; ethnographic turn and, 163–67; Kant on identity and, 64; Piper’s anthropological stance and, 49; Smith and, 186. See also subject and object Office of Management and Budget (OMB), U.S., 191–93 “Of Mimicry and Man” (Bhabha), 156 O’Grady, Lorraine, 37 The Ohio Project (Lee), 221, 222, 229 O’Neal, Mary Lovelace, 143 On the Road series (Smith), 155, 262n1, 266n74 Orientalism, 121–26, 220, 260n128, plates 5–8 otherness: Antin and, 98–100; binary system of identification and need

Index

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otherness (cont.) for, 10; ethnographic turn and, 211; Kant and, 64; Lee and, 210–13, 220, 223, 226; Mezzrow and, 107; Orientalism and, 121–26; Piper and containing the critical audience within, 68–69; Pipers’s instantiation of consciousness of, 74–76. See also blackface; difference; identity narratives “other-­oriented” acting method vs. self-­based technique, 158–59 Other Than Art’s Sake (Kennedy), 249n3 Out of Order, Out of Sight (Piper), 251n45 outsider status: Antin and, 87, 112, 118, 120; ethnographic turn and, 164, 211; Lee and, 230; Mezzrow and, 108; Smith and, 169–71 Out There (West), 148–49 Owens, Craig, 85–86, 134 Paik, Younhee, 143 Palin, Sarah, 234–35, 274n2 Palin, Todd, 274n2 Park, Mrs. June (persona, Smith), 180–83, 187, 269n117, plate 11 Parker, Paul, 176 particularism: Lee and, 191; multiculturalism and, 147–48; political campaigns and, 233–34; postidentity discourse and, 206; Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles and, 182–83 passing: Antin and, 129–32, 261n140; author’s mother passing as black, 1–3; cross-­dressing and, 15; definitions of, 12–13, 247n28; identity crisis and, x; as identity performance, 12–14; Lee and, 210; power and, 16; by robots in Blade Runner, x “Passing for White, Passing for Black” (Piper), 55 Pearl, Mariane, 12 Pegrebin, Letty Cottin, 95–96 Pelligrini, Ann, 260n139

“performance artist,” negative connotations of, 248n50 performativity and performance: artistic intent, 22; bodies and, 18; Butler’s theory of, 9, 19, 59, 158; categories of performance, 21–22; Piper and performativity of identity, 59–64; Smith’s “other-­oriented” method vs. self-­based technique, 158–59; of texts, 23. See also specific artists and personae Perreault, John, 70, 254n108 “personal is political” approach, 92, 95, 146, 244n4 persona-­play performances, 37 Phelan, Peggy, 16 phenomenology, 64–65, 68, 159, 253n102 Pincus-­Witten, Robert, 127 Pindell, Howardena, 37, 100–103, 142 Piper, Adrian: alternate media, exhibition venues, and delivery modes, 62, 69; anthropologist language used by, 48–49; audience and, 28, 42, 46–47, 54–57, 64–77; background of, 38; body-­oriented practice, 40–41; as conceptual artist, 38, 61–62, 215– 16, 250n32; cultural and discursive milieus, 6–7; discursive positioning of, 38–42, 54; drawing, enjoyment of, 253n102; goals for The Mythic Being, 55; on identities as “natural,” 39–40; identity-­play earlier in life and career, 251n45; “identity politics art” and, 29–30; insecurity in costume and behavior, 252n72; Internet and, 239, 275n14, 275n17; journal excerpts by, use of, 46; in Kennedy’s Other Than Art’s Sake, 249n3; “mantras” of, 46; misrecognition of stereotypical narratives, 51; passing, cross-­dressing, and racial ambiguity, 55–58; rhetorical persona and, 22; subject/object divide and acting out

against audiences and, 67–74; Village Voice ads and, 28, 44–47, 53, 62; yoga and, 253n84, 253n102 Piper, Adrian, works of: “Art as Catalysis,” 41–42, 66–67; Catalysis series, 42–44, 43, 62; Cornered, 55, 275n14; Drawing of Philip, 251n45; Food for the Spirit, 44, 62, 254n112, plate 2; Funk Lessons, 275n14; “My Slave Name” (poem), 251n45; Out of Order, Out of Sight, 251n45; “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” 55; Rationality and the Structure of the Self, 239, 275n17. See also Mythic Being series (Piper) playfulness and Piper, 56–57 Pocahontas (Antin), plate 4 political correctness, 146–48, 265n49 “political race,” 200 politics of identity: American modern artists and, 8; Antin and, 90, 106, 109–11, 133; black arts and women’s art movements and, 33–37; blackness, civil rights movement, and, 5–6; Clifford’s identity-­based movements, 208; ethnographic authority and, 164–65, 208–12; feminism and, 91–97, 102; “identity politics” vs., 5, 244n4; multiculturalism and, 138, 144; Orientalism and, 122; Piper and, 28–30, 41, 47–48, 54–55, 74; in political campaigns, 233–35; postidentity ideology, 199–206; postmodernism and, 85; Smith and, 151– 55, 165–66, 182–83, 187–88; Whitney Biennial Exhibition and, 149–50. See also identity narratives; specific movements and discourses Pollock, Mica, 199 postconceptualism, 86–87, 216 postidentity ideology: Bonilla-­Silva on colorblind racism, 201–2; federal ethnoracial categories, changes in, 191–93; Freestyle show and Golden

on, 202–6; Guinier and Torres on colorblindness and political race, 199–201; Lee and, 199, 206, 217; meaning of, 199; multiculturalism and, 150; post-­black discourse, 112, 202–5; postfeminism, 225–26; in Raimundi-­Ortiz’s “Ask Chuleta,” 237; Studio Museum in Harlem and, 205–6 postmodernism, 84–86, 116, 134, 209 poststructuralist theory, 9, 82, 209 Powell, Laurence M., 136, 264n4 The Predicament of Culture (Clifford), 163–67 presidential campaign (2008), 233–35 primitivism: Antinova and, 125–26; blackness and, 11, 111; Foster on, 211; Josephine Baker and, 117; Lee and, 210; Mailer’s “White Negro” and, 257n63; Piper and, 48; snapshots and, 214 “Prisoner of Hope” (Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles), 159–63 The Prisoner of Persia (Antin), plate 8 professionalism: Lee’s Yuppie Project, 207–8, 212, 227, 229, plate 15; Smith’s identification with, 171–75; straight hair associated with, 270n122 Project RACE, 192 Projects series (Lee), 189–90; common threads in, 197–98; critics on, 190–91, 209–13, 217, 220–21, 227, 230; discursive milieu of, 7–8; as documentary, street, and snapshot photography, 212–17; The Drag Queen Project, 193; ethnographic turn and, 209–12, 216–17; gaze, self-­sameness, and difference of Lee in, 226–30; The Hip Hop Project, 216, 217–18, 220, 272n54, plate 16; The Hispanic Project, 227, 228; identity as ambiguous and fluid in, 193; The Lesbian Project, 225; The Ohio Project, 221, 222, 229; per‑ formance categories of, 21–22; privi-

Index

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Projects series (Lee) (cont.) leged position of Lee in, 230–31; The Punk Project, 193–95, 194, 195, 197–98; The Skateboarders Project, 225, 227; The Swingers Project, 206–7, plate 14; The Tourist Project, 195–98, 197, plate 12; Tseng’s East Meets West compared to, 198; The Young Japanese (East Village) Project, 195, 196; The Yuppie Project, 207–8, 212, 227, 229, plate 15 psychological realism, 158 The Punk Project (Lee), 193–95, 194, 195, 197–98 Puryear, Martin, 142 Pygmalion (Shaw), 243n1 race: Antin’s King of Solano Beach and, 113–14; colonialist doctrines of, 246n11; colorblindness and racism, 199–202; Mezzrow on “phony idea” of, 258n84; mixed-­race, multiracial, or biracial individuals, 170–72, 268n112; multiculturalism and, 138, 139; nudity and, 254n112. See also blackface; blackness; passing; whiteness race-­paranoia of Antin, 130–31, 261n154 Racism without Racists (Bonilla-­Silva), 201–2 Raimundi-­Ortiz, Wanda, 236–39, 275n14 Rationality and the Structure of the Self (Piper), 239, 275n17 Rauschenberg, Robert, 70 realism: conceptualism and, 214; documentary mode and, 166–67, 215; ethnographic authority and, 210–12; Lee and, 211–15; psychological, 158; Smith’s mimicry and, 157–59 Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (Antin), 80–81, 103, 124–26, plates 6–8

representation, 179–87, 258n97 rhetorical personae, 22–23. See also specific personae Rice, Condoleezza, 97 Riis, Jacob, 213 Ringgold, Faith, 262n155 Roberta Breitmore (persona, Hershman), 37 Rodriguez, Marnie Salupo, 225 Rogin, Michael, 105–6, 257n68 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery, 80 Rosenbaum, Sarah, 272n54 Rosler, Martha, 84, 214 Ross, David, 145–47 Roure, Constance, 245n10 Rubinstein, Ida, 121, 123–24 Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (Craft), x, 56 Ruscha, Ed, 70, 214 Said, Edward, 122, 260n128 Salas, Rudy (persona, Smith), 269n117 San Francisco Art Institute Worlds in Collision symposia, 141–44 Sayre, Henry, 127–28 Schapiro, Miriam, 36 Schechner, Richard, 166 Scott, Ridley, ix–x Seedbed (Acconci), 37–38 self-­portraits: Lord’s Un/Defined Self-­ Portraits series, 239–41; Piper’s Food for the Spirit, 44, plate 2 self-­referentiality and Piper, 42 self-­reflexive documentary films, 167 Senghor, Léopold, 33 separatist exhibitions, 203 shape-­shifting of fictional characters, 243n1 Shaw, George Bernard, 243n1 Sheinbaum, Stanley (persona, Smith), 180–83, 181 Sherman, Cindy, 85–86, 240 Shoot (Burden), 37–38 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 205–6

The Skateboarders Project (Lee), 225, 227 slaves, x, 56, 243n2 Smith, Anna Deavere: on audience reception and stereotype issue, 184– 87; cultural and discursive milieus and, 7; as mixed-­raced, 170–71; neutral mediator persona of, 175–79, 176, 177; “other-­oriented” acting method and, 158–59, 183; outsider persona of, 169–71; professional woman persona of, 171–75; rhetorical persona and, 23; Schechner on, 166 Smith, Anna Deavere, works of: Building Bridges Not Walls, 267n74; Charlayne Hunter Gault, 267n74; Fires in the Mirror, 155, 262n1, 266n74; Gender Bending, 267n74; On the Road series, 155, 262n1, 266n74; Talk to Me, 178; Voices of Bay Area Women, 267n74. See also Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith) Smith, Barbara, 96–97 Smith, Roberta, 145–47 Smith, Sidonie, 23 Smith, Tony, 65, 253n92 Smithson, Robert, 74 snapshot photography, 190, 214 social determinism, Lee on, 221–23 social molding of identity, and Piper, 58–59 Sollor, Werner, 268n113 “Sources of a Distinct Majority: Agenda for the 1990s” symposium, 142–43 Spears, Britney, 10 speech. See language, speech, and accents Spivak, Gayatri, 245n7 Steele, Michael, 235 stereotypes: Antin and stereotypes of blackness and Jewishness, 110; of black woman, 116–18; caricature vs., 184; hypermasculine and emascu-

lated stereotypes in Piper’s Mythic Being, 52–55; Lee’s Projects series and, 229–30; Mailer’s The White Negro and, 257n63; performative critique of, 21; Piper’s misrecognition of, 51; in Piper’s “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus,” 76–77; power and, 248n48; as ready-­made iconographies, 20–21; signs shortcircuited by Antin, 133–34; Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles and, 184–85; social types vs., 50–51 Stieglitz, Alfred, 245n10 street performance genre, 21–22 street photography genre, 213–14 Strider, Marjorie, 70 Studio Museum in Harlem, 202, 205–6 subject and object: dematerialized objects, 62–63, 215–16; Piper and containing the critical audience within, 68–69; Piper’s “The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus” and, 74–76 submissive position of viewers of Piper’s “The Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter,” 66 substitution, figurative and phenomenological, 18–19 Sussman, Elisabeth, 146–48, 150 The Swingers Project (Lee), 206–7, plate 14 “Taking Identity Politics Seriously” (Clifford), 208–9 Talk to Me (Smith), 178 Tallchief, Maria, 82, 255n3 Tasker, Yvonne, 226 Taylor, Charles, 138 Technology/Transformation (Birnbaum), 85 theatrical performance genre, 21 This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa), 91–92, 256n53 Thompson, Debby, 158, 267n87 Tobin, Pnina, 96

Index

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Topic One: Contemporary Art (Raimundi-­Ortiz), 236–39 Torres, Gerald, 199–201 The Tourist Project (Lee), 195–98, 197, plate 12 transparency, autobiographical: Lippard and, 141 Trebay, Guy, 212, 220–21, 229 Tseng Kwong Chi, 198, plate 13 Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah, 143 Tucker, Sophie: blackface and, 106–7 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith): “AA Meeting” scene, 151–55; aims of, 136–37; Angela King, 269n117; authorial point of view, 168; background (Rodney King incident), 136, 263n3; Cornel West, 159–63, plate 10; critics on, 183–84; Daryl Gates, 180–83, 182, 269n117; discursive milieu of, 7; documentary sequences in, 166; Elaine Young, 269n117; Elvira Evers, 269n117; ethnographic turn and, 165–67; film vs. stage version of, 137, 167–68, 264n8; hairstyles in, 160, 172–74, 177, 268n116–270n119; Jessye Norman, 269n117; “Justice” section of, 151–55, 176; “Losses” section of, 159–63; male driver with Smith in, 168, 169, 173–74, 173; Maria, Juror #7, 151–55, 269n117, plate 9; mediation, representation, and audience reception of, 179–87; mimicry and translation, 155–58, 162, 183; Mrs. Hun, 185–86; Mrs. June Park, 180–83, 187, 269n117, plate 11; multiple and competing discourses in, 147, 150, 153–55; origins and process of, 135, 155, 166, 167, 262n1, 263n2; performance categories of, 21; “Prisoner of Hope,” 159–63; Rudy Salas, 269n117; as self-­reflexive documentary, 167; Shelby Coffey, 269n117; Smith as neutral mediator in, 175–79, 176, 177;

Smith as outsider in, 169–71; Smith as professional woman in, 171–75; Stanley Sheinbaum, 180–83, 181; Whitney Biennial exhibition (1993) and, 144–45 Ukeles, Mierle, 84 Un/Defined Self-­Portraits series (Lord), 239–41 universal humanism, 7, 8, 17, 201, 245n7 “usable past,” 245n10 van Proyen, Mark, 143 Vicario, Gilbert, 213 Villa, Carlos, 141–42 Village Voice: Piper’s advertisements in, 28, 44–47, 53, 69–74, 72, 73; role of, 69–70 viral technologies, 242 Voices of Bay Area Women (Smith), 267n74 Wallace, Michele, 116, 257n63 war campaigns (1970s), 38–39 Watson, Henry K., 264n4 Watson, Julia, 23 West, Cornel, 148–49, 183–84 West, Cornel (persona, Smith), 159–63, plate 10 “white-­box people,” 236–39 The White Negro (Mailer), 257n63 whiteness: Antin’s Ballerina and, 114– 15; Antin’s “racist waiter” incident and, 119–20; Lees’ Yuppie Project and, 212; as ordinary, normal, unraced, 11, 112–13; Smith’s critique of, 175; white privilege and postidentity discourse, 204 white supremacy, 34, 201–2 White Woman (persona, Pindell), 101–2 Whitman, Walt, 221 Whitney Biennial exhibition (1993), 144–50, 164

Who Cares about a Ballerina? (Antin), 255n2 Wilding, Faith, 35–36 Wilke, Hannah, 70 Wilkinson, Raven, 82 Williams, Bert, 14–15 Williams, Damian, 264n4 Wilson, Fred, 268n97 Wind, Timothy E., 136, 264n4 women artist political groups, 39, 250n34 women’s art movement, 34–37, 41 women’s liberation movement, 33, 34, 36 Worlds in Collision (Villa), 141–44

The Year of the White Bear (Fusco and Gómez-­Peña), 164–65 yellowface, 220 yoga and Piper, 253n84, 253n102 Young, Elaine (persona, Smith), 269n117 The Young Japanese (East Village) Project (Lee), 195, 196 Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (Kruger), 86 YouTube, 238, 275n14 The Yuppie Project (Lee), 207–8, 212, 227, 229, plate 15

Index

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Ch erise Smi th is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Austin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Cherise. Enacting others : politics of identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith / Cherise Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4782-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-4799-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Performance art—Political aspects. 2. Performance art—Social aspects. 3. Ethnicity in art. 4. Gender identity in art. I. Title. NX456.5.P38S658  2011 700.92′273—dc22  2010031780