Venus or Penis Envy
Raul Zamudio
Transvestism in art and culture has a curious and concomitant checkered history. It can be the bawdy, safe, normative heterosexually appealing sort of cross-dressing associated with Dame Rose, for example. Or, it can have the discursive and artistic punch of the mother or father of them all Duchamp’s Rrose Sselavy. Recently, this under-explored register of artistic practice has appeared in the work of the Israeli-born, London-based artist Oreet Ashery.
While Ashery’s practice runs the gamut of sculpture, photography, video, installation and web-based projects, she has garnered attention for her provocative performance based work that is ciphered through a persona by the name of Marcus Fisher. Fisher, however, is not your ordinary drag king bloke a la Murray Hill, for example, but is a Hasidim and his exploits have veered far of the Jewish ultra orthodox sectarian path.
In a series of photographs that constitute part of the growing "Fisher" corpus, we see him staring intently at the camera, cigarette in hand. He mulls and returns the gaze of the lens to deflect the obvious ethnographic voyeurism that scans his traditional garb, his culture and his self. In no less quotidian displays that are equally charged with a myriad of subtexts, we see him with his back to us with his shirt off. There is an ambiguity conveyed in this picture regarding gender as this rear view could have easily belonged to the second sex.
Now that I have let these two terms out of the bag, understanding them as not synonymic is foundational in appreciating the subtle and nuanced complexities of Ashery’s work. For sex refers to the biological differences between male and female, while the other underscores the cultural anchoring of these roles and their signifiers that operate within normative societal parameters.
Thus, for instance, same-sex kissing on the cheek as greeting that is prevalent in one part of the world and devoid of sexual orientation could be misconstrued in another part of the world as being particularly gendered and therefore effeminate. Ditto with other gendered signifiers that seem to be stable, but on closer inspection and with the passing of time and social mutation are in fact mutable.
These are some of the tropes that Ashery tweaks in her "Fisher" series. But there is a more subversive political dimension in these works than meets the eye. Ashery’s mining of a specific culture brings with it its gendered baggage that one cannot cleave either from its original cultural location or from her "real" gendered being that collides with the persona she masquerades. Here, I am adamant in putting real in quotation marks as well, because gender, like identity in general is always in a state of flux. It is, by nature, fluid, protean and malleable. Who among us can claim to be, for example, the true American and what constitutes this geo-cultural category? Even the most naïve understanding of that rubric that presumes that Native Americans are true Americans is essentialist, deterministic and culturally reductive. Is there one Native American experience, one African-American experience, one Italian-American experience and so forth that can somehow be universally understood and that can exemplify and encompass what it is to be member of those ethnic groups?
These are some of the questions that are on the surface of Ashery’s work, but since she is a woman working under the literal and figurative cloak of patriarchal culture, there are other levels to her work that take the register of drag as an artistic practice into different directions than the vaudevillian Dame Rose, Murray Hill or Lady Bunny.
One alternate route has been her role as therapist in live performances as Marcus Fisher that she has created in hotel rooms and museums around the world. The project, titled "Say Cheese", is now interactive and transposed to the web and experienced at: www.7actsoflove.org. However, what has distinctly distinguished Ashery from the safe drag we have come accustomed to be when we see Marcus with a prosthetic penis as he menacingly points at something outside of the picture plane…possibly deflecting away "menstrual filth"? The homo-social nature of Hasidic culture is also brought to the fore in another picture in which Marcus has bewilderingly discovered his feminine side by the female breast that he holds in his hand, he stares at this mass as if it is something from another planet, from Venus maybe?
