Abstract
Martyna Majewska’s debut book explores how, starting from the 1970s, African-American artists – David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Pope.L, Glenn Ligon, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell and Adrian Piper – utilized performance for the camera to challenge existing representations of Black and Brown individuals in the US. They were among the first to expand the practice of performance art through the use of meticulously crafted photographs, films and videos. This was a crucial strategy as it allowed the work to be shared beyond its immediate audience. Their expanded performances deconstructed fixed notions of race and gender perpetuated by American popular culture, legal systems and pseudoscience. African American Artists Performing for the Camera After 1970: Against Transparency investigates how photography allowed these artists to integrate their bodies and personal experiences into their performances, navigating between inviting and excluding autobiographical interpretations.
In the introduction, the author posits that performance for the camera is particularly well suited for examining new and nonconformist relationships concerning racialized, class and gendered identities, including heteronormativity. Majewska argues that the effectiveness of this mode of artistic expression lies in the camera component, which facilitates a critical examination of deeply embedded paradigms of representation that contribute to the construction and stabilization of identities. Furthermore, she believes that such artists have been successful in questioning the association of lens-based media with transparency and truth, thereby encouraging viewers to be sceptical of images produced by mainstream media. The book examines images artists have produced alongside their embodied performances to investigate the ways in which identity is constructed through representation. Through these images, the artists illustrate that self-representation is a negotiation between individual and collective identities, as well as between the personal and the political. Majewska notes that she is addressing a gap in Performance Studies literature as well as writing on African American art since most of the work examining performance photography neglects class and race while foregrounding white artists’ work. For instance, Rosalind Krauss’s (1976) writing which discusses the video art of white artists Bruce Nauman, Nancy Holt and Vito Acconci, and features a self-reflective aesthetic that examines the medium itself and its own properties and methods of representation.
In the first chapter, ‘Exaggerated Features: Adrian Piper on the Limits of Performativity’, Majewska discusses how the US film industry perpetuated racial stereotypes through popular entertainment and pseudoscientific depictions of ethnic minorities, alongside maintaining a strict ban on interracial desire. Prior to the 1970s, African Americans seldom saw themselves represented on television and, when they were, it often involved outdated stereotypes. Adrian Piper aimed to challenge this narrative with her performative work – for instance, in Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), she explores the expectations of race and gender on the body. As a white-passing Black woman, she prompts viewers to reflect on how their perception of her changes according to how she is racialized; the photograph contradicts its title by showcasing Piper as a Black woman. The accompanying text – ‘Whut choo lookin at, mofo?’ – urges viewers to recognize and confront how stereotypes shape our perceptions of individuals.
In the second chapter, ‘The Outrageous Abstraction of Senga Nengudi’s Performance Photography’, Majewska examines how the artist and her collaborators integrated installations, sounds, musical scores, dance and other elements into their performances. Majewska argues that Nengudi, by emphasizing the photography of ephemeral work, navigates between two established theoretical views: Peggy Phelan’s belief that performance art is unrecordable and irreproducible due to its nature of bodily disappearance, and Phillip Auslander’s claim that performance art is indeed realized through photographic representation (Auslander, 2006: 5; Phelan, 1993: 146). Through a discussion of Rapunzel, a (1981) work by Nengudi featuring a gelatine silver print, Majewska suggests that the resulting photographs are abstract, challenging our understanding of photography as mere documentation of performances. Rapunzel portrays a pantyhose headpiece linked to wires covered in hair set against a decaying building. Working outside a gallery, the alternative setting for this form of Black artistic expression can be seen as institutional critique and an assertion of autonomy. However, the work seems resistant to interpretation, and challenges Majewska’s claim that abstraction in photography can communicate effectively irrespective of the background or gender of the person viewing it. Seeing the performance in the flesh, with the somatic connection between artist and audience, might have served to elucidate the artist’s intentions more clearly than inert photography of the work.
In chapter three, ‘Howardena Pindell’s and Maren Hassinger’s Subversive Video-Narcissism’, Majewska delves into how the two artists, both females, challenge the sexism and racism that exists in the art world and beyond through their performative video art. Pindell engages in a piece of theatre in Free, White and 21 in which a white character (the artist in a blonde wig, whitening makeup and sunglasses) responds dismissively to a Black character, played again by Pindell, as the latter points out instances of racial discrimination in the 12-minute video. Hassinger's ‘Daily Mask’ (2004) is a 3-minute performance video that examines identity, race and historical representation through masking. In the film, Hassinger systematically applies black grease paint to her face, alluding to the ritual use of masks in African cultures and the complicated history of minstrelsy and blackface in America. Through a discussion of these two works, the chapter problematizes the history of video art and its role in perpetuating stereotypes of race and gender in US popular culture.
The concluding chapter, ‘Feeble Monuments: David Hammons and Pope.L Underperforming for the Camera’, discusses how the pair take on the simplistic portrayals of African Americans perpetuated by the media, contrasting them with their own more nuanced representations. Majewska looks at, among other things, the works in which Pope.L wore a suit and crawled through the streets of New York. The multiplicity of meanings attached to this by the artist and other commentators are examined, such as the way the artwork emphasized the invisibility of the homeless in the city and how the urban space of New York dwarfs its inhabitants. Hammons’ absurdist performances in which he peed against a Richard Serra sculpture, and the selling of snowballs are also interpreted by Majewska as works that mobilize a certain inscrutability as a form of social commentary.
Against Transparency shines a spotlight on lesser-known artists such as Maren Hassinger, whose work has never been shown in an institutional exhibition in the UK; a still from the 1978 performance Vanities adorns the front cover of the book. The book draws meaningful comparisons between the various African–American artists, which enables readers to see how the works they made were designed for audience engagement at a distance, and how they were able to contribute to a wider discourse on performance art. Majewska demonstrates that the effectiveness of this form of artistic expression is rooted in the camera element, which enables a critical analysis of entrenched paradigms of representation that play a role in the formation and stabilization of identities. The artists she has chosen have effectively challenged the prevalent notion of lens-based media as synonymous with transparency and truth, prompting audiences to adopt a more critical stance towards images generated by mainstream media. The book’s arguments are based on a series of well-researched and extensive cases that, along with the accessibility of the language used, confirm that Against Transparency deserves to be in every Humanities library.