Identity Art & Identity Politics Simplified
A distinction may be made between “identity art” and “identity politics,” two terms that were popular in the art world (and public discourse) in the 1970s and 1980s, although they’re not mutually exclusive.
Summary of Identity Art & Identity Politics
More and more artists are using art as a vehicle for self-expression, questioning social perceptions of who they are and critiquing the systems that marginalise them in society. Artists of all genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations are included in this group. Through both their art and activism, they have changed the way museums and galleries do their work and made a significant impact on issues of civil rights for people of colour.
Many critics have claimed that “identity politics” has had a reductive effect, turning artists into tokenized representatives of a particular race, gender or sexuality. This has contributed to the view that identity is inherent and fixed rather than socially constructed. The term “identity politics” gained traction in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has since fallen out of favour.
To avoid falling into this trap, many contemporary artists who are interested in exploring themes of identity have instead chosen to emphasise the shifting nature of identity as a prism through which to view society.
Identity Art is a useful umbrella phrase for comprehending artistic activities that focus on the identity of the artist and the art world’s reception of their works. There is no one form or style of Identity Art. White, heteronormative, and male experience has been cited by several artists as the foundation for art industry norms. There has been a long history of art history that has unfairly marginalised those artists whose work did not meet certain standards or address similar issues, and Identity Art is an attempt to right this wrong.
An often misguided discussion about the necessity of art connecting with identity has resulted in greater awareness and dramatic shifts in the treatment of work by historically marginalised groups by museums, galleries and critics. Identity Art and Identity Politics have left a legacy of decolonization campaigns, diversity programmes, and critical reflective curation.
Identity-based art poses a risk to its practitioners. Many artists today deal with themes of identity via the prism of “intersectionality,” which perceives diverse dimensions of identity (such as race, sexuality, age, etc.) as interconnected. An additional viewpoint that supports this one is that of “performativity” (the theory of identity as fluid yet enforced by social conditioning).
With regards to the art world and other forms of cultural creation, Identity Politics is an important concept. Throughout the 21st century, disputes about its influence on the production of film, television, and video games have been vigorous, and in many cases mirror or pre-figure critical and curatorial controversies in museums and galleries.
Why is it Called Identity Art & Identity Politics?
Identity Art that addressed issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation was sometimes referred as as “political,” especially in the United States..
Knowledge of and concern for specific political topics and the political system, as well as certain political behaviours, are all components of a person’s political ego identity. To put it another way, this concept captures the centrality of politics in the lives of ordinary people.
Everything About Identity Art & Identity Politics
The Beginnings of Identity Art & Identity Politics
Identity Art in the twentieth century was born out of the questioning of the art world’s gatekeeping, which had prohibited non-dominant groups from participating. Second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement in the 1960s highlighted how the dominance of white, male, heterosexual artists, curators, and arts consumers was maintained by racial and gender biases. Initially, the two movements appeared to be running in opposite directions, but in the long run, their ripple effects converged.
Many legal problems, such as women’s voting rights, were at the heart of the first wave of feminism. Second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s drew attention to the broader relegation of women to the domestic sphere and the way Western society perpetuates stereotypes about “essential” female qualities and the “proper” role of women: a patriarchal hierarchy in which women are seen as inferior and subservient to men. These topics were also a focus for feminist artists during this time.
It was hoped that some would change the art history canon, as well as historical reflection, which had tended to omit the contributions of women and instead focus on the achievements of the great males. The essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin, published in 1971, was a key piece in the campaign to correct the gender disparity in the canon of art history.
Others seek to challenge preconceptions and the idea of gender essentialism, or the assumption that gender (although the theory can also be extended to sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.) is fixed, static, and unchanging, determined by innate/inherent features. Gender essentialists believe, for example, that women are fundamentally weak at math and science. This belief has historically been used to justify restricting educational and job opportunities for women in these subjects, feeding the stereotype.
According to British film theorist Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published back in 1975, narrative film (as well as other popular media formats) generally present women as the object of a male scopophilic gaze, and furthermore, female viewers participate in narcissistic identification, meaning that they receive pleasure from being objectified in this way.
Mulvey’s remarks echoed those of English art critic John Berger, who in his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing criticised men’s visual dominance, noting that “A man acts, whereas a woman appears to be the actor. A man’s attention is drawn to a woman by her appearance. Women are acutely aware of the fact that they are constantly being seen. This is the basis for most relationships between men and women, as well as the relationship between women and themselves.” Several female artists of this era attempted to defy this hegemonic norm in their work.
The second wave of feminism happened at the same time as the Civil Rights movement, in which African-Americans fought not only for equal legal rights but also against racial stereotypes and for the definition of their own culture and identity. New Negro and Harlem Renaissance movements of the early 20th century were two of the earliest examples of this goal.
Many racial and ethnic minorities, including African Americans and Native Americans and Latinos, had begun producing art as a means of protesting the injustices that had been perpetrated against them and to dispute the perceived superiority of white artists’ works.
Frantz Fanon (a French psychiatrist, writer, and philosopher from the French colony of Martinique), who wrote about the experience of being an oppressed black person living in a white-dominated society; Edward Said (a Palestinian-American professor of literature), who developed the field of postcolonial studies and is best known for his book Orientalism (1978), in which he critiqued the Western world’s cultural representation of the Middle East; and others. Civil Rights movement and critical race, ethnicity and postcolonial theory have all had a significant impact on contemporary art in the field of identity.
Museum of Modern Art in New York held a presentation titled “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” in 1984, when masterpieces of modern western art were shown alongside “artefacts” from non-Western cultures. Primitivist Art was criticised by many because it portrayed non-Western art as inferior to that of European and American artists, rather than exploring the critical and historical conversation between the two.
An exhibition titled “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” was organised in 1990 by curators from The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art to challenge the systemic exclusion of non-White, non-Western artists from major art institutions.
As the New Museum’s current director Lisa Phillips put it: “In “The Decade Show,” it dealt with homosexuality, gay sensibility, gender concerns, and race/identity difficulties, among other things. All of this was a first for the field of museums.”
“The Decade Show” caused several other organisations to address their treatment of non-white artists following its publication. The 1993 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which focused on “the production of identity,” was one of the most notable effects of this transition. The former director of the Whitney, David Ross, said contemporary artists “insisted on reinscribing the personal, political, and social back into the practise and history of art.”
The whiteness of Western art institutions has been challenged ever since by artists like Kehinde Wiley and Renée Green as well as Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Pepón Osorio, and Lorna Simpson, among many others
Many artists have worked to raise awareness of pressing issues in the LGBTQ community such as HIV/AIDS and ongoing struggles against violence. Queer theory, first discussed by Teresa de Laurentis in 1991, has been accompanied by the gay, queer, and transgender-rights movements, which gained momentum throughout the twentieth century.
To reclaim the term “queer,” which has been used to describe non-normative (non-heterosexual) sexual identities, the word “queer” is employed here In recent decades, following queer theorists have further expanded this term, which has its roots in de Lauretis’s writings.
In general, queer theorists and artists question and critique essentialist notions of sexuality, the widespread belief in culture at large that sexual identities are fixed and biologically determined, as well as the heteronormative ideals of family life and forms of kinship that are historically and culturally conditioned yet often seen as “natural.”
“Performativity,” as developed by Judith Butler, serves as a crucial theoretical foundation for queer theory. It was first postulated in 1988 in her work on gender that performativity mandates that the construction of gender is tenuously in time through stylized repetition of activities.
These actions create an appearance of a permanent gendered self, rather than a stable identity from which other activities can flow. To distinguish between the biological and medical differences between men and women, gender is a distinct term (although the instability of this binary sexual division is now also widely acknowledged by medical and scientific professionals).
With the rise of the queer theory movement, new perspectives on art history and key works of art have been opened up. Artists such as Andy Warhol have served as a testing ground for new ideas in queer theory, such as in the writings of art historian and queer theorist Douglas Crimp.
“The emergence of disability culture and the importance of art forms and representations in this culture must be seen as a natural extension of the disability rights movement, as the disability arts movement is essentially about the growing political power of disabled people over their images and narratives,” writes Canadian researcher Jihan Abbas. Disability arts practitioners challenge the problematic ways in which the great majority of popular cultural depictions of disability have been formed.
A work or an artist may be deemed a part of Disability Arts based on a variety of factors, including the artist’s personal identify, their medical diagnosis, the experiences they have in their daily lives, the subject matter of their artwork, or any combination of these.
Since the 1980s, “disability arts” has developed as disabled people have rejected negative assumptions about their lives, defined their own identities, expressed pride in a common disabled identity and worked together to create work that reflects the individual and collective experience of being disabled, says Allan Sutherland, a disabled writer and artist.
Disabilities Arts advocates adamantly resist the idea that art therapy is a biological intervention that focuses on treating and rebuilding “damaged” bodies. As a result of this, disabled artists’ creations lose their agency, identity and artistic merit.
Concepts in Identity Art & Identity Politics
It may be helpful to distinguish between Identity Work, a wide category of art that examines themes of identity, and Identity Politics, a more historically specific phrase that became popular in the art world (and public discourse) in the 1970s-1980s. Art that dealt with race, gender, and sexuality in the United States was referred to as Identity Politics.
The term “identity politics” was coined by critics during the Reagan era to disparage the work of artists of race and queer people of sexual orientation who were pushing the boundaries during that time period (by framing them as “merely” about identity, and thus not fitting in with the skewed standards of the white-dominated art world). These dismissals, on the other hand, strengthened the case for Identity Politics by illustrating the obstacles that minority artists encounter when attempting to create art that draws on their personal histories.
Even though “identification” can become both an access point and a restricting condition, artists have come to accept identity-focused art since then. Curators Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq point out that “Artists are permitted entrance to the art system on the condition that they behave, or be framed, as socio-cultural representations of the place/people they ‘come from.'” There has been a shift from “outside marginalisation to within ghettoization” because of the emergence of Identity Politics in the art industry, they say.
Many contemporary artists are aware of the dangers of embracing their identities. Some believe, however, that they have no choice but to deal with the problem: Tschabalala Self, a modern African-American artist, remarked this “However, only a select few artists are ever questioned about their personal histories and how they came to make the work they do. The reason some artists’ work appears to be unconcerned with these realities may be because they are not forced to feel marginalised by them is because of this.”
It is inevitable that artists will have to deal with questions of identity as long as the system of marginalisation and violence against groups because of perceived identity remains. This critical reckoning will continue to be urgent for many until parity and equal opportunity in the art world is achieved (not only for artists but also for museum professionals and staff) in the art world’s system of critical and monetary valuation is truly achieved (not only for artists but also for museum professionals and staff).
Many Western art galleries and museums were hesitant to embrace identity-related issues, although progress was made outside of these institutions. When artists want to “intervene” with a gallery’s regular function, they often take their work outside of the gallery and use the gallery itself in creative ways.
Artists may make art that cannot be viewed in a normal way, or they may place their work in a more politically or socially charged environment. They may even interject their art and politics into normal conversations and social interactions, thereby changing the course of events.
Feminist performance artists, like Austrian artist Valie Export, have been taking to the streets for decades, such as when she performed Tap and Touch Cinema in 10 European towns between 1968 and 1971. The artist wore a small “movie theatre” around her nude upper torso, hidden by a curtain at the front, so that passers-by could not see her, but were encouraged to reach in and touch.
Her goal was to present the public with a real, live, breathing female body, attached to a face that answers and looks back, rather than a simple (though well produced) passive visual picture on a page or computer, to which they were more accustomed.
A more recent example is the Guerrilla Girls, an intersectional feminist group that has taken to the streets since 1985 to put up stickers, posters, and street projects all around the world. For the Guerrilla Girls, the art world is a place where injustice and inequality (both based on race and gender) are highlighted through their street interventions. On New York City’s buses back in 1989, the group rented advertising space for the purpose of displaying their own posters, such as one pointing out that “less than 5% of modern art artists are women, while 85% of the nudes” were female.
As a result, street art has shown to be a great medium for artists who want to address Identity Politics in their work because it allows for unfettered speech in public places with vast numbers of prospective spectators. There are several street artists, such as Montreal-based MissMe (who works mostly with wheat paste posters), who use their work to challenge and encourage women. In a 2018 street installation, she challenged the male-centric Christian origin story (in which the first women grew from the first man) while simultaneously reminding viewers of the pain and sacrifice required of women as bearers of new life, asserting that “I didn’t come from your rib, you came from my vagina.”
When they aren’t in the public eye, artists who practise Identity Art “intervene” in the normal viewer-artist dynamic. Ana Mendieta’s 1973 installation and performance Untitled (Rape Scene), for example, was a feminist project made to highlight the high frequency of rape and murder on the University of Iowa campus while she was a student there. A real-life rape scene was presented to audience members who had arrived via elevator, forcing them to confront a realistic scene outside of the gallery’s distancing and “protective” environment. Uninformed members of the college community would enter thinking it was the aftermath of a real assault, thereby obscuring the distinction between art and reality. The gravity of the subject and the reality of being a woman at the time were brought to light by the piece of work.
Artists of colour who want to make art that reflects the problems of their communities but live in mostly white areas, states, or countries have found that public intervention is a highly effective technique.
Since her fair skin allows her to be mistaken for white, American artist Adrian Piper, who is African-American but could be mistaken for white, performed a performance titled My Calling Card #1 in 1989-1990 in which she gave a small card to people around her who made racist remarks while she was present.
Even if the reader had no idea Piper was black, the card reminded them that their “made/laughed at/agreed with” racist remark was indeed upsetting for her. Documentation of the intervention (in the form of calling cards themselves) was all that was available for presentation in the performance.
Disabled artists have also made frequent interventions in the interaction between art and audience. English artist Tony Heaton’s 1989 sculptural intervention, Wheelchair Entrance, is a significant early piece in the Disability Arts movement.
Heaton A wooden board labelled “wheelchair entrance” was hung over a gallery doorway at a height that prevented ambulatory visitors from entering, but allowed wheelchair users to get through the opening beneath it. As a simple yet efficient way to raise awareness about architectural barriers to accessibility, the work was used. Another benefit of the exhibit was that it forced viewers to confront an instance of physical constraint and simply allowed the encounter to take on meaning from the perspective of the body, encouraging an embodied engagement with the topic of disability.
Disabilities are now seen as a societal problem rather than a physical one. This essay illustrates this shift in public discourse. A lack of a ramp, not the usage of a wheelchair, is what keeps someone from entering a facility. There are no clear ways for ambulatory guests to get around Heaton’s involvement in the area.
It is not only in unconventional settings or in methods that are unknown to art audiences that issues and politics of identity are played out. Artists often produce work that may be presented and judged in the same way as more traditional works of painting, installation, or sculpture while yet conveying an overarching political message about identity. Critique within the gallery system often connects with the questioning of the gallery system as a whole, or Institutional Critique
A recurring theme in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits was the artist’s struggle with physical infirmity (namely, the numerous broken bones and fractures she experienced as a result of a bus accident when she was a teenager, as well as her inability to carry a pregnancy to term, also a result of the accident).
Because of the paucity of representation of disabled artists in museums and galleries, her work emphasises the intersectional nature of her dual identities as a woman and an artist with a disability. Kahlo has acquired a great level of notoriety, especially in the twenty-first century, despite the fact that historically few artists dealing directly with disability issues in their work are represented in museum collections or the worldwide art market.
Many other artists have used their sexual orientation as a theme in their work since the Stonewall riots in 1969, when the gay liberation movement (as well as related movements such as the transgender rights movement) gained momentum, inspiring LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbians, gay men, transgender people, queer people, questioning people, intersex people, ally people, and pansexual people, henceforth referred to as “queer”) artists to create works that address important social issues Art that deals with topics relevant to the LGBTQ community is known as Queer Art, and one of the most renowned examples is David Wojnarowicz.
Artists who dealt with sensitive (often identity-based) content or imagery were attacked by various organisations (including the American Family Association and the Catholic League) on the basis of creating and disseminating what were claimed to be vulgar, immoral, or gratuitous images that were unworthy of the gallery during this period in the 1980s and 1990s. Wojnarowicz is one of these artists. Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes are just a few of the artists who have fallen prey to the “culture wars” (by being refused financing as well as getting harsh criticism).
Since then, Wojnarowicz’s work has received a lot of attention from curators, culminating in his 2018 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective in 2018. Similar to Kahlo’s work, it underlines the absence of formal acknowledgment for minority views in curatorial agendas, exactly like Kahlo. An important factor contributing to Identity Art’s popularity is the mainstreaming of formerly marginalised concepts into the art world’s mainstream.
The End of Identity Art & Identity Politics
Art is increasingly being used by modern artists as a means to (re-)negotiate different facets of identity that act in concert rather than in isolation. Race and gender law expert Kimberly Crenshaw invented the word “intersectionality” in 1989, arguing that a person’s identity is not established by a single factor such as gender, but rather a combination of factors, such as socioeconomic status, education, and ethnicity. To name a few: sex, race/ethnicity/diaspora, handicap, and class; as well as physical appearance and chronological age.
The term “post-identity (politics)” has been introduced by several scholars and is associated with the idea of posthumanism. Deleuze and Guattari are among those who have influenced post-identity thought, which advocates for a view of identity as a dynamic process of flux, change, impermanence and incoherence. As we were saying: Art and Identity in the Age of “Post” at EFA Project Space in New York in 2014, many of today’s identity-focused artists incorporate notions of post-identity into their work.
One such group was the participants in that show. “In Spirit of (a Major in Women’s Studies)” was created by A. K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard and displayed as part of the exhibition. It was a wastebasket packed with various items such as a studded leather belt, a power strip with plastic snakes on it, and a feather-stuffed rose. Even though they’re located in a wastebasket, these objects don’t immediately correspond to any one distinct “identity,” instead inviting a variety of associations. Rather of a fixed and known identity, the work insists on an incoherent identity.
The concept of “identity art” may no longer be taken as a fixed genre or style, but rather as an awareness that many artists bring to their creative processes in order to explore multiple dimensions of identity through art (even so as to critique or complicate it). A critical and historical perspective can also be used to approach artworks, even if they were not constructed with “identity” in mind.
Key Art in Identity Art & Identity Politics
Dinner Party
By Judy Chicago
1974-1979
With 39 place settings honouring prominent women in history, this installation is a vast triangular ceremonial feast. In the triangle, each of the three “wings” represents a distinct era in history. For example, the Primordial and Fertile Goddesses, Ishtar and Kali are all represented in Wing I. It covers women from the early Christian period (for example, Marcella and Saint Bridget) to the Reformation (such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Caroline Herschel, and Sojourner Truth), as well as women from the American Revolution to more recent feminist thinkers (such as Anne Hutchinson). Gold chalices, flatware and napkins, as well as hand-painted china porcelain plates that feature raised vulva and butterfly forms are all included in each table setting’s exquisite embroidery. (each of which was created in a style that represents the individual woman the place setting was made for).
Over a hundred volunteers and artisans worked tirelessly for five years to construct this project in Chicago (male and female). New York’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art permanently houses the piece, which was initially shown in 1979. “Ending the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record” was Chicago’s stated purpose for this project. In 1974, while at a dinner party, she had the epiphany, saying, “Aside from one doctorate-holding woman who wasn’t a professor, the men at the table all held university professorships. The women were the ones with the most talent, yet they remained silent as the men demonstrated their skills. A thought occurred to me: “Women don’t have their own version of the Last Supper.”” For consideration, women had to meet the following criteria: make an important contribution to society, work to improve the lives of other women, have an impact on women’s history, and serve as a role model for a “more equal future”.
Dinner Party marked a turning point in the art world’s treatment of women’s stories. Additionally, the film caused much debate about how best to portray women and their lives. Feminist reviewers did not universally welcome the play because of its essentialism, but it made a strong case for the importance of interacting with female stories and brought to light the politics underlying their prior absence. To show how women/feminist artists try to question the male-dominated nature of history writing, the piece serves as an example of how to alter the (art) historical canon. It gave a seed for other means of breaking ideas about “talent” and creative brilliance that had been utilised as a barrier for other minorities in the art world, such as artists of colour. A well-known work of feminist art, Dinner Party can be seen as a forerunner to the more recent genre of Identity Art.
The Black Factory Archive
By Pope.L 2004-current day
Pope.The L’s Black Factory Archive is a travelling caravan, a community engagement programme, and a catalyst for debate that welcomes involvement wherever his white truck stops. Passersby are urged to bring in an object that expresses “blackness” in their own way and place it on display. Reflection on which objects are linked with blackness (and why?) and what kind of history, social construction, and stereotyping are engaged in the inscription of identity onto objects might be facilitated through this process of reimagination. Other items for sale include canned goods, bottles of water, T-shirts, and the famous yellow rubber duckies dubbed “The Black Factory” by the gift shop located nearby. “Staff” and entertainers accompany him wherever he goes, who “run” the Factory and perform skits for the public. “The goal, as the artist saw it, was to re-create the ambience of a public square. You want the audience to feel included in the conversation. That being said, I don’t want people to think that we’re going to breeze through this issue.”
While biological markers such as skin colour are commonly used to define racial identity, historians and theorists have shown that the concept of “race” as a social construct only emerged in the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment classification thinking and the white subjugation of people racialized as Other and therefore “savage” and inferior came together. Slavery in America has a long history and continues to have repercussions to this day because of this ideology of race. He is an African-American artist whose work focuses on the history of slavery in the United States, as well as today’s experience as a black person in the country. The Black Factory Archive illustrates the diversity of perspectives on identity by posing an open-ended question. Material culture also plays a significant impact in the shaping of identity and vice versa; this is shown by the study.
Artifact Piece
By James Luna
1986
An exhibition case with a leather loincloth was Luna’s setting for this performance, which took place at San Diego’s Museo del Cielo. Personal effects and ritual items utilised on La Jolla Indian Reservation where Luna lived were also labelled across his body, including scars from “excessive fighting” and “drinking,” among other things. Records by the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, shoes, political buttons, degrees from colleges, and divorce documents were among among the items on display. During the museum’s open hours, Luna remained in the display case for several days, occasionally stirring or opening his eyes to gaze at visitors.
A Mexican-American artist of Payómkawichum, Ipi, and Mexican descent, Luna (1950-2018) was born in Orange, California, and lived much of her life on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in San Diego County. A year after that, he graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and seven years later, from San Diego State University with a Master of Science in Counseling. His intention was to draw attention to the romanticization or presentation by cultural institutions of indigenous culture as extinct, lost, or pure and unaffected by change. This was his purpose. “The necrophilous protocols of the museum,” says art critic Jean Fisher, “is thereby exposing… the manner that cultural institutions… construct corpses out of living Indigenous peoples.” Remarking on Luna’s observation, “To my dismay, museums’ depictions of our peoples were all rooted in the past. They were skewed in only one direction. We were little more than a collection of bones and items that had been signed and dated.” By putting his own body in front of museum visitors, he forced them to confront their own anthropological beliefs and prejudices in an unexpected way. Although they knew he was alive, many of the guests still spoke about him as if he weren’t there.
With his collection of ritual and secular objects, he further highlighted the composite reality of indigenous life and culture in the modern era. He said the following about the project: “We Indians in the United States have been pressured in numerous ways to live up to the standards of what ‘Being an Indian’ means to the broader public: in art, it means the piece ‘Looked Indian,’ and that look was controlled by the market. No one bought it because the market stated it didn’t appear “Indian,” thus it didn’t sell. If it didn’t sell, then it wasn’t an Indian product.
Many Indian artists, I believe, have lost their sense of identity by creating work that has nothing to do with their culture or their place in the world today, or by creating work for the benefit of others rather than for themselves.” Luna further on this point, saying: “Performance and installation art, in my opinion, provide Indian artists with a unique opportunity to express themselves authentically in the traditional arts of ritual, dance, oral tradition, and current ideas. To express oneself in these (non-traditional) venues, one can employ a wide range of media such as found/made objects as well as audio, video and slides.” The objectification of Native Americans by white people was thus called into question. With the help of Fisher, Luna sought to “disarm the gaze of the voyeuristic gaze and deny it its structural power” by positioning himself in an authoritative position. He thereby implicated museum-goers without their prior knowledge or consent in the performance. Other indigenous and people of colour artists, such as Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Coco Fusco, and the performance collective La Pocha Nostra, have used this method.
Rainbow Series # 14
By Candice Breitz 1996
To create this image, the artist spliced together images from South African postcards and Western pornography. The result is a peculiar hybrid being made up of a female Black African topless from the waist up and a female white naked from the waist down, both dressed in red leather knee-high boots and red fishnet stockings from the thighs down. With her red-painted fingernails and a daring stretch across her buttocks, the white female hand holds open her vagina for the observer’s inspection.
When Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, she relocated to Berlin where she currently resides and works as a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art. Breitz’s Rainbow Series examines and critiques the various cultural depictions of and impacts on post-Apartheid South Africa. At some point after the end of Apartheid, people in South Africa tried to re-negotiate their identity as the “Rainbow nation,” a place where people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds could live together in harmony (a national motto adopted during the 1990s).
Tourist postcards were created as part of this effort, and many of them featured Black Africans who looked like they belonged in rural surroundings. Although the photographs were meticulously crafted, they utilised models instead of “genuine” people. A substantial amount of Western pornography was imported into South Africa when the country began to open its borders to foreign media.
Consequently, throughout the 1990s, South Africans were bombarded with sexualized pictures of white women that were almost exclusively depicted. Breitz explained that the Rainbow Series was “my response to the contagious post-Apartheid metaphor of a South African ‘Rainbow Nation,’ a metaphor which tends to elide significant cultural differences among South Africans in favour of the construction of a homogenous and somehow cohesive national subject.”
In this series, Breitz employs a photomontage method that is anything but elegant, with her cuts between photos being harsh and brutal. As a metaphor for both the continuous brutality against women in South Africa and the tumultuous process of negotiating one’s identity, Breitz used this method. Brietz put it this way: “I think it’s because I’m constantly struck by how many women are being slit open in the world, both literally and figuratively.
The Rainbow People are reassembled as horribly sutured exquisite corpses, their myriad identities shattered and damaged. Neither do they resemble the smooth, sleek computer-generated images produced by some artists, nor do they represent the romanticised hybrid imagined by some postmodern writers. Porn is now available in South Africa for the first time in decades, and inner Johannesburg has one of the highest rape and murder rates in the world. This series is a perverted look at the fictitious tribe believed to populate “New” South Africa.” This photomontage is an example of détournement, a Situationist approach that repurposes existent media in a way that is critical of or opposing to the original.
His work focuses on the intersectionality of various facets of identity (such as how gender identity is further complicated by one’s race), and Breitz’s Rainbow Series is a good example of how this might be done. In a 1996 interview, she revealed that “We’re here to talk about gender, but I think we should also talk about other aspects of identification, like race or class or ethnicity. If you don’t take these problems into consideration, you won’t have any genuine power. Our identity is never solely “male” or “female,” “black” or “white,” and we all experience numerous types of identification.”
Stories of a Body
By Mary Duffy
1990-2000
After a few minutes of solitude and darkness, Duffy emerges from a pitch-black chamber naked and severely spotlighted from the front. Duffy’s body, which has been described as “severely crippled,” presents an audience member with the ironic insight that Venus de Milo, one of art history’s most iconic images of feminine beauty, does not have arms at all.
She was one of the driving forces behind the development of disability arts in the United Kingdom, Mary Duffy (born 1961). As a painter, she graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1983 and went on to earn a Master of Equality Studies degree from the University of Dublin.
For her contributions to the international disability arts movement, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the National University of Ireland in 2003. Due to thalidomide toxicity, Duffy was born without arms. Thalidomide was commonly administered for pregnant women in the 1950s and early 1960s to alleviate their nausea. The use of thalidomide during pregnancy was later revealed to frequently result in serious birth abnormalities. When Duffy was a child, she mastered the art of drawing and painting without the use of her hands or even her fingers.
According to Duffy, the overwhelming majority of representations of disability are the work of those who are not disabled, and as a result, these representations have contributed to the pervasive and largely negative views towards disability understandings. She says, “While attending art school in 1980, I began to examine and question my own identity as a person with a disability and a lack of cultural references. Non-disabled people have developed disability reference points that portrayed persons with disabilities as tragic, pathetic, or valiant. Disabled people are often depicted in a negative light in these photos, and I had to look for an image that I could be proud of, an image that was not overtly emotional or pity-inducing, and one that portrayed disability as being a part of being human.”
Between 1990 and 2000, Duffy performed this piece in a variety of settings. Stories of a Body was inspired by the artist’s desire to “hold up a mirror for you, to make you reconsider the nature of your voyeurism,” which she describes in her essay about the project. Thus, Duffy’s performance aimed at rethinking the way in which the able-bodied and visibly disabled are viewed in relation to one another. As a result, Duffy urged viewers to realise their own identity, disability, and difference through the act of looking and staring.
When people stare, they are displaying the power relations between the subject positions of impaired and able-bodied people, according to disability studies expert Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. According to Garland-Thomson, “The act of focusing on a person’s impairment creates a visual connection between the observer and the spectacle. Staring creates an uneasy connection between the watcher and the viewed by telescopically focusing on the physical symbol of impairment. Due to the stigma attached to the act of staring at someone with a handicap, the disabled person becomes both the subject of the stare and the object of the gaze, heightening the tension between the observers and the subject of the gaze. When you stare at someone, you’re creating an absolute difference rather than just another human variation.”
Becoming an Image
By Cassils
2012
A 1500-pound block of clay sat in the middle of a pitch-black room for this performance, which was initially staged at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Cassils, a Canadian, gender non-conforming and transmasculine artist, kicked and punched the clay for 24 minutes in order to physically alter its shape. As a result of this exhausting effort, the artist was photographed grimacing and pouring with sweat, and these images were later displayed in various exhibitions of Cassils’ work (with the modified blocks of clay). Additionally, recordings of the performance were made and displayed at later shows, with the sound of Cassils’ physical exertion included in the piece itself.
Professional Muay Thai boxer Cassils worked with to prepare for the performance in which they physically attacked the clay block To Cassils, the physical effort it took to reshape the clay spoke volumes about how hard it is to develop and retain one’s physique and one’s identity at the same time. Transgender people around the world have been subjected to violence as a result of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Indeed, Cassils sees the reworked clay block as a tribute to trans people’s tenacity and resilience.
In order to keep the audience in the dark, the performance was meticulously staged. Only quick bursts from colleague Manuel Vason’s camera lit Cassils’ furious performance, which audiences saw only in flashes. This location can be interpreted as a metaphor for the difficulty of cisgender individuals seeing the struggle and persistence of trans people.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
