Enacting Others

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

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4782-8

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………….xiiiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..1Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..271 “The Politics of My Position” ADRIAN PIPER AND MYTHIC BEING……………………………..792 The Other “Other” ELEANOR ANTIN AND THE PERFORMANCE OF BLACKNESS…………………………1353 “Other-Oriented” Performance ANNA DEAVERE SMITH AND TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES…………………1894 Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the Repackaging of the Politics of Identity……………………233Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….243Notes…………………………………………………………………………………277Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..293

Chapter One

“The Politics of My Position”

ADRIAN PIPER AND MYTHIC BEING

In 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. 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. 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. 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 two-dimensional works through a “widely distributed newspaper.” 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.” 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 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 art-history 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 which people were motivated. Group members and leaders demanded self-determination 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 dominant 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 decision-making 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.” With direct 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.” 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.”

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. 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.” 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.”

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.” 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.” 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.” 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.”

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’.” 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.” 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.” 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.

(Continues…)

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