REBLOG : http://hyperallergic.com/86044/animating-the-archive-black-performance-arts-radical-presence/
Animating the Archive: Black Performance Art’s Radical Presence
A visitor makes up his own game using Benjamin Patterson’s “Pond
(1962),” at the Grey Art Gallery exhibition “Radical Presence: Black
Performance in Contemporary Art.” (all photos by author for
Hyperallergic)
Documenting performance art has always been
tricky. There have been tons of panels and talks in the past year or two
about the challenges and benefits of different methods of archiving.
Martha Wilson, founder of
Franklin Furnace, is developing a
searchable database of work that her organization has hosted or supported over the years. The
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics has mounted a free online
digital video library that allows viewers to see a wide range of work by artists from across the Americas. And the recent
re.act.feminism
project brought together new performance with re-performance of old
works, a web-based archive, exhibits of documentation and ephemera, and
lectures.
But many of the issues surrounding documentation and
re-performance boil down to one simple fact: there’s no way to fully
capture what it feels like to be there during the original performance.
Not only is it impossible to capture things like the smell or psychic
energy flowing between a performer and their audience, you can’t
re-create the political and social milieu in which the work was made.
For this reason, one of pieces that struck me right off the bat when I entered the exhibition
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at
New York University’s Grey Art Gallery was Lorraine O’Grady’s “Mlle
Bourgeoise Noire” (1980–83). In the gallery, the work is represented by a
series of 12 black-and-white photographs from her 1981 performance
“Mlle Bourgeois Noire goes to the New Museum.” What makes the images so
striking is not just O’Grady’s use of the iconography of the beauty
queen, with her broad smile and long gown (in this case made entirely of
white gloves purchased from thrift stores), but also the fact that you
can see the reactions of people witnessing the performance. You can
begin to read things like confusion, curiosity, discomfort, amusement,
and distance in their facial expressions and body language.
According to
O’Grady’s website,
these performances were intended as invasions of established art
institutions — both the many spaces that were exhibiting work
exclusively by white artists and black art spaces like
Just Above Midtown.
Given her use of surprise and confrontation, the photos offer tiny
glimpses of the effect that she might have been having on unsuspecting
partygoers, whipping herself and shouting through glossy lipstick: “WAIT
wait in your alternate / alternate spaces / spitted on fish hooks of
hope / be polite wait to be discovered … THAT’S ENOUGH don’t you know /
sleeping beauty needs / more than a kiss to awake / now is the time for
an INVASION!” (View the full set of images
here.)
As the scholar
Thomas DeFrantz said in a
panel organized in conjunction with the exhibit, “Performance that is improper can shift the air.”
Installation view, “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” at the Grey Art Gallery
One
of the great things about performance, because it happens in real time,
in real life, and often in front of other people, is that you have to
negotiate whatever you’re feeling in public. Who knows what people were
feeling when they showed up that night in 1981 to the opening at the New
Museum, then still a relatively new space in the city? Whatever it was,
there’s no doubt that for many of them, O’Grady’s unexpected presence
changed it, even if only briefly.
In the ninth photograph in the
series, she speaks to the crowd that had cleared to give her space and
attention. Her escort stands nearby holding her cape and behind him,
along a wall, are a number of onlookers. There are folded arms, hands in
pockets, furrowed brows; one woman leans in to whisper to another; two
others stand on tip toes to see over the escort’s shoulder. It’s a
collage of uncertainty in the face of O’Grady’s knowing act.
Another
artist in the exhibition whose performance work is shown through
photographs that include the reactions of the audience is Clifford
Owens. Among the large color images from his
Anthology series,
there’s a subset of five in which you see him kissing and pressing his
body up against both men and women. That particular performance was
inspired by a performance score written for him by the artist
Kara Walker, a
later iteration of
which generated some controversy. Even if you weren’t one of the ones
he touched directly in the performance, Owens is forcing all those
witnessing his actions to grapple with them. Does this make you
uncomfortable? Why? Does it turn you on? How does his black male body
shift the narrative of what’s happening? Does it matter that he’s
pressed against a white woman here, and a white man over there? It’s all
well and good to intellectualize the response when looking at the
photograph, but in a live performance you can’t really get away from
your feelings and the feelings of the other people in the room; it’s all
part of the experience.
Performers are invested in sculpting,
enlivening, challenging, and transforming spaces. A huge part of that
involves the expectations of the audience. On the panel, DeFrantz also
spoke about how different contexts can have a huge impact on a
performance, and any performer knows this all too well. Being in a
bright, open gallery space where people can freely come and go is worlds
apart from being in a theater where people are essentially trapped with
you for some period of time, or even from being out of the street,
where you’re one of hundreds of possible distractions and people’s
expectations of safety and purpose are very different than they are in
an arts venue. For DeFrantz, questions also arise about how values shift
around “the performance of blackness within a context of majority
whiteness.”
Side view of Satch Hoyt’s “Say It Loud!” (2004)
Walking
through an exhibition surveying a selection of performance art by black
artists, it was impossible not to wonder what constitutes blackness and
who fits within that category. And given one of the summer’s most
talked about art world spectacles, Jay Z’s
“Picasso Baby” performance
at Pace Gallery, it was also impossible not to think about the way in
which blackness does or doesn’t fit into popular conceptions of what
performance art is, despite a long history of artists of color making
work.
Jay Z’s performance and
video also seemed to come to mind for the panelists, all of whom mentioned it in their talks. Moderator
Tavia Nyong’o,
a professor of Performance Studies at NYU, actually started the evening
by showing a clip in which the artist Jacolby Satterwhite
seems to briefly disrupt Jay Z’s own expectations for what his performance should be.
Panelist
Malik Gaines,
a performer and scholar, started by affirming that this exhibit is part
of a growing field and history of performance that’s becoming more
complete and nuanced as scholarship and documentation increasingly
highlight the work of artists of color, among others. But he questioned
what was included and what got left out of the show by looking at his
own performance work with the group
My Barbarian,
which wasn’t included in the exhibit. Was it omitted because the work
is more theatrical and less strictly based in his own body? Because the
group he works with includes artists who aren’t black? His questioning
seemed less an accusation or confrontation with the show’s curator,
Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston, than a way to explore some of the limits inherent in any
identity-based show.
Fellow scholar
Daphne Brooks
offered what might be an alternative to asking who gets included, and
even an alternative to focusing on how performance impacts the audience,
by suggesting that for “the inheritors of black critique, performance
gives us the chance to capture ourselves.” She also drew on her recent
teaching on the 50th anniversary of the
March on Washington and reflections on both the
Trayvon Martin court case and the effect of the
Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision
on the Voting Rights Act. Brooks said she was interestedin the way that
“activists inhabit, re-inhabit, and relearn protest, civil disobedience
and protest performance.”
The
standing-room-only crowd at the Sept. 26 panel discussion “Radical
Presence: Black Study and Black Performance” at NYU. On the panel, from
left to right: Tavia Nyong’o, Thomas DeFrantz, Daphne Brooks, and Malik
Gaines.
Hearing such different reactions and thoughts by
these scholars reinforced the fact that performance operates
simultaneously on many levels. Everything happening in the space and in
the larger culture is at play in the moments when the work is realized.
And each viewer, along with each performer, has their own nuanced
experience of the work.
Radical Presence gives a great
taste of some of the work done by black artists working in performance
over the past five decades. And one of the best things about it is that
it’s not just a static archive. So, don’t let your experience be only an
encounter with objects in a gallery. See the exhibition (a second part
of which will open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month), but also
see one of the
many live performances or talks that
run into February. Don’t let this exhibit be just an intellectual
experience; let yourself be surprised, amused, confused, made
uncomfortable, drawn in. As Audre Lorde said, “Our feelings are our most
genuine paths to knowledge.”
Part I of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
continues at Grey Art Gallery (100 Washington Square East, Greenwich
Village, Manhattan) through December 7. Part II opens at the Studio
Museum in Harlem (144 West 125th Street, Central Harlem, Manhattan) on
November 14.
