This week, we finish our module on performing raced and gendered bodies. After reading Elam, Foucault and Butler think about the new tools you have to read the performance of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee and Yinka Shonibare. Consider how these performances interrogate, reinscribe and/or subvert the the intersecting and mutually constitutive boundaries of racial, gender and sexual identification in performance. What do the performances enable or foreclose to concepts of race and gender identification?
While Butler is concerned with the issue of performativity, both Yinka Shonibare and Cindy Sherman are showcasing how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and much more is performed in their own art work. Both artists are careful about creating and crafting characters that are not easily identifiable from a particular positionality, and letting the viewer draw their own conclusions. Both artists seem intent to show that everyday life, is little more than a performance.
ReplyDeleteShonibare’s own work features headless neutral colored mannequins and other aspects that attempt to counter the “determining” ideas of race, his works as a performance artists intrigues me most. Near the end of his segment, Shonibare talked about the “movie” style artwork that performed the assassination of a Danish prince. Not only were the dancers/actors obviously performers but there features a doubled layered performance of class as the assassins, Shonibare discussed, were peasants that planned the assassination, starving while their king lived a lavish lifestyle. Shonibare seems fascinated with how individuals perform not just themselves, but how they interpret the performances of others and what this means for society.
Similarly, Cindy Sherman’s own artwork is always a performance, as she takes self portraits of herself dressed as different characters, trying to convey the life they lead in a single image. While known for this style, Sherman attempts to embody a new characters and “life” through each self portrait. While not spoken directly, it certainly implies the idea that one woman can can become different characters through her own surroundings. Similar to Shonibare’s desire for the audience to interpret, Sherman seems caught in the idea of the audience interpreting the rest of the character’s life and circumstance through a single photograph, which is why she refuses to name them. Perhaps the best known aspect of this idea is the “Black Sheets” image, which many viewers claimed it was about rape, when Sherman had intended it to be an early morning hangover.
Both artists continue to explore how the audience perceives individuals performances in everyday life, and how those interpretations of performances continue to change and shift over time.
Like everyday is a photo collection by the Iranian contemporary artist, Shadi Ghadirian, that was never displayed in galleries inside of Iran. Having featured outside of the country, however, Ghadirian asserts that the collection was a great success and that the Westerners were astonished by the feminist statement made in her work regarding the condition of women in Iran.
ReplyDeleteThe very act of rejecting the display of her work signifies the existence of a discourse that tends to excludes women from its vocabulary. As Judith Butler states, “A constitutive or relative outside is, of course, composed of a set of exclusion that are nevertheless internal to that system as its own nonthematizable necessity. It emerges within the system as incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity.” Being considered an outsider does not entitle women to act as a free agency. Quite the contrary, this exclusion compels them to define their subjectivity through the reiteration and practice of the very norms that have excluded them in the first place. Thus the performativity of these women, as Butler asserts, “is not a singular “act,” for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires as act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.” While this discourse denies the identity of women by literally and symbolically concealing them under the chador, it makes it possible for art works such as Like Everyday to exist. It is such an existence that helps the discourse mark the destabilized status of women and stamps the exigencies of a continuous patrilineality
In Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” she takes as a “point of departure” (p.22) a notion derived from Foucault, that “regulatory power produces the subject it controls.” Power here is not simply an external force then, but something which creates, informs, defines, shapes, contours and constructs both outside and from within, shaping identity in all its standard social signposts for our current moment: sex, race, skin color, gender, etc. So what does it mean to perform race? Or perform gender? Butler’s work is famous for linking gender with performativity, so how might this translate to race?
ReplyDeleteThe artists in this module: Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee, all have something in common, which is that they transgress gender and racial bounds as imposed and defined by the dominant culture. I am inclined to think of this style of performance or artistic expression something which speaks to the idea of transcending the self. But at the same time that these artists are transcending the self, they are breaking through something else too, which is society’s boundaries of who they are allowed to be based on their race, gender, and additionally in Shonibare’s case, disability. In Lee’s photography, she immerses herself into “sub-cultures:” pockets of identity, and according to Holland Cotter who reviewed her work for the New York Times, this process could take weeks or months in order to achieve successful immersion (Cotter “Art in Review”). For an artist such as Lee, what signifies artistic success in her work? Is it that she arrived at a more nuanced understanding of the subculture she entered and ultimately, we are all human? Or is her acceptance into a box apart from the one she is otherwise defined as – Korean-born – an act of transcendence on the part of those with whom she merges, who no longer view her as a Korean photographic artist, but as someone whose race and gender are suddenly apparent as the social constructions they are?
In his article "Technologies of the Self", Michel Foucault’s belief that ‘know thyself’ has obscured ‘take care of yourself’ serves as a foundation for the ideas set forth in this module. This concern with the performativity of our lives resurfaces in Judith Butler’s book Bodies That Matter when she writes that it must be “understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.” Butler further claims that sex is not inherently gendered, but created. “To claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced.” However, Butler argues that when society assumes one’s sex must manifest itself in a specific gendered way, that person’s sex is devalued. “Sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges.”
ReplyDeleteSociety not only constructs gender, but race. In his article "The Device of Race", Harry J. Elam writes that race has been defined as “a construct that is historically, socially, and culturally determined.” Like gender, race does not appear in culture already defined. It is not enough to embrace the application of race, but to use theatre “as a means of protest and revolt in order to change black lives and fight oppressive conditions.” Yinka Shonibare does this successfully as he criticizes the Empire and excess with post-racial mannequins. As Nikki S. Lee immerses and documents herself in the lifestyles of various American subcultures, she admits it was only through other people that she could know herself. Consequently, she shows us that gender, like race, are “not a product of biology, but of social, cultural, and historical forces.” As Foucault illustrates through St. Gregory of Nyssa, taking care of oneself is a constant practice if one is going to “recover the efficacy which God has printed on one’s soul.”
Jenna Lyons
ReplyDeleteBoth Anna Deavere Smith and Nikki S. Lee use their non-white, female bodies to interrogate hegemonies of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States. In Twilight: Los Angeles, Deavere Smith performs races, genders, and classes outside her own. By performing as a body of dominance, like when she takes on the character of a white male, Deavere Smith subverts the subordinate position hegemony has placed on her African American, female body and prompts her audience to question how American identities have been constructed and understood. In a similar way, Lee uses her Asian female body to perform characters of difference. A marked difference in Lee’s work is that she does not attempt to perform outside her female-gendered body. In The Hip Hop Project, The Ohio Project, and The Lesbian Project, Lee performs characters in hegemonically subordinate positions: a young woman of color, a poor, rural woman, and a lesbian. I would argue that these “projects” are not working to subvert dominant hegemonies, in the same way Deavere Smith’s performances attempt to diminish and question positions of power, by performing characters of power with a body of subordination. Since Lee’s characters in these three projects rely on performing as female, her work does not critique the power behind male bodies. In Lee’s The Yuppie Project, she does critique positions of class power, by performing as a young, urban, professional, but she maintains female-gendered body and perspective.