An Icon of Play and Provocation

“I make self-consciously radical use of my body in order to realize Narcissister’s capacity to incite reactions from the audience and compel them to question their own relationships to these cultural taboos.”

Narcissister, From the “Man/Woman” photo series, 2010. Archival Inkjet Print, 20×24, Courtesy of Narcissister and Anna Kustera Gallery

An Icon of Play and Provocation

Narcissister

Narcissister is a multi media performance project that has been the primary focus of my artistic production for the past three years. The Narcissister persona brings humor and spectacle to explorations of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. I integrate performance (including elaborate costumes and sculptural props), video, photography, and collage to establish Narcissister as an iconic character who presents herself both playfully and provocatively. Performing as Narcissister integrates my past experience as a professional dancer with my interest in identity expression and critique in the visual arts. Using movement, music, fashion, and other visual tools, Narcissister takes on a variety of complex, highly charged roles. She has been, among others, a waitress at a hotdog joint (and the hotdog), a Russian doll, a mammy figure, an exercise fanatic, an eastern-European old woman, a Muslim Barbie, and, in one performance, both a teenage boy and his porn star fantasy.

I conceived Narcissister as embodying flamboyant and excessive expressions of the cultural stereotypes that I most want to parody and subvert. In her many iterations, Narcissister sometimes wears candy-colored, obviously fake fingernails, or pneumatic fake breasts, or an impossibly huge afro wig. In my artwork, I mine some tropes from the cabaret tradition, including frank, stagy sexuality and hyper-feminine glamour. In the cabaret context, sex and glamour are often the goals, but, for Narcissister, these are only the building blocks for performances, videos, and images that serve to question the titillation rather than merely provide it. I use humorous or deliberately shocking vignettes and images to resist the easy thrill of unexamined sexuality and self-display.

Narcissister communicates with her audience using neither words nor easily interpreted facial expressions—Narcissister’s face is literally a plastic mask. Masks are important to me as they allow me to fully embody the character and disappear completely into her. Wearing masks as Narcissister facilitates my exploration of the malleability of identity. By putting on masks with different features and different skin colors, I am able to present my own racial identity as flexible and performative.

Essential to the Narcissister project is the underlying frame of my own body, culturally marked and legible as a bi-racial woman. Performing as Narcissister requires that I fully commit my body and myself as I confront longstanding taboos. I make self-consciously radical use of my body in order to realize Narcissister’s capacity to incite reactions from the audience and compel them to question their own relationships to these cultural taboos. For example, in the piece I’m Every Woman, Narcissister is nude on a rotating stage. During the course of Chaka Khan’s song, she strikes stylized poses as she dresses herself in an entire outfit that she produces from inside her bodily orifices. This is both a play on the lyric, “I’m every woman, it’s all in me,” as well as an ironic blurring of the song’s celebration of female empowerment with the superficiality of fashion.

My Still Life Collages use the characteristic Narcissister trappings of the flawless plastic masks, elaborate wigs, and fashion accessories, but emphasize the artificiality of identity stereotypes in the imagery even further. I combine flat media images of women’s faces and bodies with the masks and fake body parts, and in some of the collages household items overwhelm or even replace the body parts. This connects to the props I make for each of my performances where inanimate objects often take on human qualities as Narcissister interacts with them. While finished artworks in themselves, the collages also provide a laboratory for me to experiment with new performance characters. I use the two-dimensional work to develop an initial portrait of a character that ultimately will come to life through Narcissister’s performance.

Many diverse artists have influenced my work, from Josephine Baker, to Pierre Molinier, to Yoko Ono, to Leigh Bowery. Figures like Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, women who fearlessly exploited their own bodies in their artworks and performances, provide strong inspiration. William Pope.L and Matthew Barney are also important sources.