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Speaking out of turn: race, gender, and direct address in American art museums

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Speaking out of turn: race, gender, and direct address in American art museums

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SPEAKING OUT OF TURN:

RACE, GENDER, AND DIRECT ADDRESS IN AMERICAN ART MUSEUMS

by

Stephanie Sparling Williams

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(AMERICAN STUDIES & ETHNICITY)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Stephanie Sparling Williams

ii

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it”
-My mother; Zarina Shockley-Sparling

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv
LIST OF FIGURES v
ABSTRACT vi
Speaking out of Turn: An Introduction 1
The Voice & Radical Speech Acts 5
“Fits, bursts, and starts” 10
Museums: Direct Address, an Aesthetic Strategy for “Talking Back” 16
Who is Speaking? Who is Creating? 22
Artist Introductions 26
Methodological and Theoretical Frameworks 30
Chapter Breakdown 36
CHAPTER ONE: On Turning: Video Installation and the Question of Orientation 40
Video Installation & Phenomenology 46
Racialized Bodily Orientation 53
Disorder and Re/orientation 64
A Critical [Re]Turn to History 73
Critical Historical Turns 80
Conclusion 85
CHAPTER TWO: Mark My Words 88
“From Here”/ “I Cried”: Interpellation and the Position of the Spectator 93
Double-Voice: Cut Paper Poetry 104
Vanilla Nightmares 113
Conclusion 118
CHAPTER THREE: A Room of One’s Own: White Walls and Alien Bodies 119
The Cage: Social Gest and Intercultural Performance 128
The Aggressive Productivity in Failure 138
“A Room of One’s Own”: Direct Address Art and the Performance of In/Security 143
INVASION 152
From the Galleries to the Streets 166
Conclusion: Productivity in Alien Effects and Otherness? 168
CHAPTER FOUR: Astride the Lens: Radical Self-Staged Portraiture 171
Astride the Lens: A Theoretical Framework 180
The Theory Done in this Body 187
Exposure 187
Creative Labor: Overtime and Double-duty 195
Telling the Truth, Dealing with You 200
Transplanted Self: a Conclusion 206
CONCLUSION: Sugar Baby, and the “co-opting nature of so-called
postmodern cultural conditions” 211
BIBLIOGRAPHY 219
APPENDIX IMAGES

iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to start by thanking my family: my parents Zarina and Steven Sparling, my
sister Shelley Sparling, and my husband Corey Williams. This dissertation was attainable
because my parents believed in me for 28 years; they invested in me, and loved me in a
way that led me to believe that I could do anything.
A small and cherished group of friends have supported me (and my work) while
completing my Ph.D.: Valerie Smith, Danielle Hasso, Maytha Alhassen, and the
overwhelmingly magical Brittany Farr. I have been so fortunate to enjoy the love,
encouragement, and support of these brilliant women.
My dissertation defense was everything I had hoped it would be, aside from my
parents’ absence; it was a love fest. The people in the room represented a wide range of
support. Most were there because they have nurtured this research and/or have loved and
nurtured me at some point during the last five years, perhaps most significantly, my
committee. I want to thank Dorinne Kondo, Robeson Taj Frazier, Amelia Jones, and Kara
Keeling for allowing this work to be what it is. That is, for allowing it to be a journey and
not a destination. Thank you for wading through the deeply personal roots of my project
and for facilitating my growth as a scholar. Thank you for sticking with me and being
patient with my process.
Of course there were many who did give up on me, and others who generously
contributed to the trauma of my graduate school experience. This dissertation is also for
them. I hope they can recognize the stress, anxiety, pain, and betrayal I have endured
because of their thoughtlessness and cruelty. I acknowledge each of them. Because of
various abuse and failed relationships, I will be a better scholar and a better mentor
towards other emerging women of color academics, so, much gratitude.
I want to thank all of my Los Angeles based friends and colleagues. Many of you
have read very early (and very bad) drafts of this work—giving your time and intellectual
energies to its development. Others still have shared space and ideas over coffee, lunch,
dinner, and many many drinks. Thank you for thinking with and against me, for
challenging me, and most importantly, for keeping me company. Finally, I want to
acknowledge my incredible mentors. These were generous individuals who have made
significant investments in my success and in me during my time in graduate school.
Specifically, Dorine Lawrence-Hughes, Robin Kelley, Lanita Jacobs, Uri McMillan, and
Rebecca Peabody, I want to publicly thank you all for your warmth, wisdom, and your
sage advice.

And last but certainly not least, I want to especially thank my husband Corey, for
holding me in your heart. For loving and nurturing my body and my spirit —for
recognizing my humanity and for being radically open to the changes I have undergone
(both good and bad) over the last five years.

I see this dissertation, the one you are about to read, as a collective achievement,
and I appreciate all of these brilliant individuals’ contributions.
v
LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: Adrian Piper Mythic Being Series (1973)
FIGURE 2: Adrian Piper Cornered (1988); installation view
FIGURE 3: Shirin Neshat Turbulent (1998); video stills
FIGURE 4: Shirin Neshat Turbulent (1998); video still
FIGURE 5: Carrie Mae Weems Constructing History (2008); production still
FIGURE 6: Carrie Mae Weems Constructing History (2008); video still
FIGURE 7: Carrie Mae Weems. And I Cried from From Here I Saw What Happened and I
Cried, 1995–96.
FIGURE 8: Carrie Mae Weems “You Became Playmate to the Patriarch,” “And Their
Daughter,” from From Here I Saw What Happened.
FIGURE 9: Lorraine O’Grady Cutting Out the New York Times; installation view,
Daniel Reich temp space, Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2006
FIGURE 10: Lorraine O’Grady “The Renaissance Man is Back in Business” (Part 2), in
Cutting Out the New York Times (1977).
FIGURE 11: Lorraine O’Grady “Missing Persons” (Part 4) in Cutting Out the New York
Times (1977).
FIGURE 12: Lorraine O’Grady “Missing Persons,” in Cutting Out the New York Times
(1977).
FIGURE 13: Adrian Piper Vanilla Nightmares #2 (1986); retrieved from artic.edu
FIGURE 14: Adrian Piper Vanilla Nightmares #8 (1986)
FIGURE 15: Coco Fusco and Gómez-Peña. Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West
(1992-1994).
FIGURE 16: Coco Fusco. “A Room of One’s Own”: Women and Power in the New
America (2006-2008).
FIGURE 17: Lorraine O’Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire ((1980); performance still
FIGURE 18: Lorraine O’Grady. Art Is… (Nubians); Afro-American Day Parade, Harlem,
1983.
FIGURE 19: Lorraine O’Grady Art Is. . . (Colt 45 “African” Float); Afro-American Day
Parade, Harlem, 1983.
FIGURE 20: Adrian Piper Food for the Spirit (1971).
FIGURE 21: Stephanie Sparling Williams and Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971)
(“Me, My Selfie, and Adrian Piper); research image (2015).
FIGURE 22: Carrie Mae Weems. Kitchen Table Series (1990).
FIGURE 23: Zanele Muholi. Bona (Charlottesville), 2015.
FIGURE 24: Z. Muholi. “Bester II (Paris, France, 2014)
FIGURE 25: Z. Muholi. “Bester V” (Mayotte archipelago, 2015)
FIGURE 26: Z. Muholi. “Bester IV (Mayotte, 2015)
FIGURE 27: Z. Muholi. “Bester I (Mayotte archipelago, 2015)
FIGURE 28: Zanele Muholi. Hlengiwe (Paris), 2014.
FIGURES 29-34: Stephanie Sparling Williams, all “Untitled,” 2009-10.
FIGURE 35: Delphine Diallo and Sidi (Leghead). “The Soul in a World without a Soul”
(2011); production still
FIGURE 36: Delphine Diallo and Sidi (Leghead). “A Soul in a World without a Soul”
(2011).
FIGURES 37-39: Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage
to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane
fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino
Sugar Refining Plant (2014); installation views.
vi
ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the radical nature of women of color’s out of turn
speech and presence in American contemporary art museums through the strategy known
as direct address. Speaking out of Turn poses four central questions: who is allowed to
speak in fine and contemporary art museums—that is, whose work is hung on gallery
walls and exhibited in sites of prominence in the fine art world? How can the artistic
category of direct address and the idiom ‘to speak out of turn’ be read alongside each
other in order to produce new meaning in contemporary art discourse surrounding under-
represented, under-exhibited, and under-theorized artists of color often excluded from
these spaces? Does the direct address works made by women of color artists disrupt
and/or challenge the practices of viewing art in contemporary art museums? And if so,
how do these disruptions orient, disorient, or reorient art spectators?
Direct address is an artistic device, as well as a loose category for art that
confronts the viewer. I use video installation, mixed-media performance, radical self-
portraiture, and text and textual references within visual art works as central sites for
exploring and analyzing direct address. Specifically, I analyze the ways Lorraine
O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco Fusco mobilize
direct address strategies to reveal the way the art spectator is interpellated as a political
subject into social structures of gender and race and to contest the power relations
embedded in fine art viewing practices. It is in this context that I develop ‘speaking out of
turn’ as a specific mobilization of direct address strategies by women of color—it is both
a theory and a methodology for contextualizing and rigorously engaging their creative
practices.
vii
This dissertation demonstrates that, even as women identified artists of color have
been begrudgingly accepted into the fine art world in the past several decades, they
continue to be rendered invisible and voiceless even as their work is displayed. This
research charts how these women use visual and sonic registers to trouble the field of
vision and claim a voice. Specifically, I argue that ‘voice’ and ‘presence’ are registers of
the visual, which must be examined in order to fully capture the political potential of
visual art. Toward this end, I use an interdisciplinary set of approaches to explore the
boundaries of direct address as an artistic strategy, in order to examine how its disruptive
tendencies have reoriented art’s history and display.

1
Speaking out of Turn: An Introduction

Speaking out of turn is a decolonial apparatus—a methodology of the
oppressed—one that I argue is used to trouble vision.
1
Art that speaks out of turn is an
integral dynamic of the long narrative of silencing and erasure of artists of color within
American history and culture.
2
This dissertation examines direct address in American art
museums utilizing the art of five contemporary women of color artists. Drawing upon
theories of performance and interpellation, cultural studies, and visual studies, this
interdisciplinary analysis offers a framework to assess visual art that “speaks out of turn.”
My research uses 1) radical self-portraiture; 2) mixed-media and performance; 3) text and
textual references within visual art works; and 4) video installation as central sites for
tracing the bounds of direct address as an artistic strategy. Speaking out of Turn analyzes
the ways Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco
Fusco mobilize direct address strategies in the contemporary art world by speaking and
existing out of turn. Arguably, the disruptive nature of unsolicited speech has an impact
on art museums and changes the exhibition dynamics in gallery spaces. This dissertation
assesses these artists complicate the relationship between art and the spectator by using a
variety of creative media and technologies to reorient viewers to the raced and gendered
subjects of their work. Thus, Speaking out of Turn probes the bounds of direct address as

1
Here, I use “methodology of the oppressed” as outlined by Chela Sandoval (2001) alongside
Nicole Fleetwood’s “troubling vision” (2000), as both a theoretical and methodological
standpoint for this dissertation. Also, the work of Macarena Gómez-Barris (2009) on
representation and cultural memory as decolonial apparatus has influenced my thinking here and
throughout the dissertation.
2
Jayna Brown. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
2
an artistic strategy in order to examine creative disruptions as sites of revision and
reorientation within American art museums.
In my statement of purpose for graduate school admission, I proposed to
“critically examine and locate the important effects race, gender, class and sexuality have
on aesthetics and what has historically been accepted as ‘art.’” This project asked
questions such as, who can be recognized as artists, what are their credentials, and where
do folk arts and crafts, hip hop, and other race and cultural specific traditions meet “fine
art” movements and designations? And while I never imagined getting to the heart of
these questions by thinking through the phonic significance of visual art objects, I am
coming to find that the questions of “who is allowed to be an artist?” and “how they are
an artist” are tied up with the question this dissertation poses: who is allowed to speak in
the art museum?
My dissertation moves beyond real or imagined speech acts, to examine what
artists do with the platform of the contemporary art museum when they find themselves
caught in the structure of visual existence. Said another way, this project is invested in
the semiotics of those often rendered invisible and voiceless: how they come into the
field of vision and have a voice. I am concerned with what this voice sounds like, but
more prominently, I ask what this voice looks like. As a visual artist and visual studies
scholar by training, thinking through visuality has always been at the center of my
intellectual pursuits. Recently, pioneering work in culture and sound studies has inspired
me to think differently about visual objects, specifically art. Posing more questions than
answers through the dissertation, I use contemporary art as a central site for critical
3
inquiry. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most interesting and under-theorized incidents
of “out of turn” speech can be found in visual art.
Speaking out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art
Museums examines the radical nature of out of turn speech and out of turn presence in
American contemporary art museums through the strategy known as direct address.
Direct address figures most prominently in the history of American art during the late
1970s and 1980s with the rise of new expressive manifestations of the feminist
movement: appropriation, assemblage, mixed media performance, and aesthetic labor as
institutional critique.
3
During this time, the contemporary art movement experienced a
sizable shift away from discourses of Modernism toward a focus on those producing on
the margins of the art world.
4
Here, direct address within visual art can be understood as
inheriting the concerns and techniques of literature and theater as it intervenes in
audience engagement with each particular medium through modalities of disruption and
interference.
This dissertation enters the conversation at a turbulent moment in the 1970s and
1980s when white feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Mierle
Laderman Ukles, and a few non-white artists were given space within the art world to
show their work.
5
The arrival of these practitioners marked the emergence of language
around direct address, used to describe their work in a variety of dizzying contexts,

3
Brandon Taylor. Contemporary Art: ART SINCE 1970. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall Art,
2005).
4
By modernism I mean the styles and creative movements that dominated Western culture and
thought from the mid-19
th
century through the 1960s. This period is most often characterized by
its rejection of past styles, emphasis on experimentation in materials and form, and innovation in
technique. Modernist ideals encompassed notions of the “cutting edge,” “progress,” and the
“avant-garde,” distinctions artists of color (and women) have almost entirely been excluded from.
5
Craig Owens and Scott Stewart Bryson. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and
Culture. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.)
4
including several interviews in which artist Barbara Kruger recognizes direct address as a
viable tactic within her work regardless of medium specificity.
6
Kruger states, “[d]irect
address has motored my work from the very beginning. I like it because it cuts through
the grease...Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the
medium that I’m working in.”
7
Because of its nebulous uses and loose associations of
artists, the particular rhetorics of direct address have never before been distilled within
the American art historical context. Thus, Speaking out of Turn also seeks to locate and
pin down some of the boundaries of direct address as an important artistic modality, one
that can be blueprinted through a variety of expressive sites.
I meditate on speech and radical presence underlying visual art objects as a
political technology in ways similar to Chela Sandoval’s meditations on love as a
political technology in Methodology of the Oppressed. If speaking out of turn can be
understood in the Sandovalian sense as a methodology of oppressed or marginalized
individuals and communities, I argue that direct address becomes part of speaking out of
turn’s technological repertoire. Direct address is a technology necessary for generating
dissident and coalitional cosmopolitics, and for revealing the rhetorical structures by
which the languages of aesthetic supremacy are uttered, rationalized, and ruptured.
8

Feminist artists and women identified artists of color have taken up this strategy, just as
literary and theater practitioners have in the past, in order to move spectators politically,
to reveal structures of power and technologies of vision, and in other cases to complicate,

6
Shauna Miller. “The Unsettling, Text-Driven World of Barbara Kruger’s ‘Belief + Doubt,’ in
The Atlantic. August 21, 2012. Online Access. May 9, 2015.
7
The Art Story: Modern Art Insight. “Barbara Krugar Biography”
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kruger-barbara.htm
8
Chela Sandoval. Methodologies of the Oppressed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), 3.
5
disrupt, deceive, mislead, or redirect viewers through their visual constructions. These
artists also use direct address in order to tap the participatory potential for their artworks
to enter into dynamic spectator relations as extensions of their own material and
ideological subjectivities. The significance of both direct address and speaking out of turn
is that they reveal/make visible the workings of power. The analytic hook for the
dissertation, speaking out of turn, gestures both toward the disruptive power and potential
for the artistic category of direct address, while also taking seriously the question of why
particular groups are not allowed to speak and to exist in the first place. I argue that these
confrontational artworks have the potential to disrupt the power matrices that define the
colonial rhetorics of Western fine art spaces. In so doing, I develop a set of theoretical
apparatuses for decoding direct address art’s effects or potential effects on spectators.

The Voice & Radical Speech Acts
“[The] Black woman, silent, almost invisible, in America, has been speaking for three
hundred years in pantomime or at best in a borrowed voice.” –Josephine Carson, Silent
Voices: The Southern Negro Woman Today
Speaking out of turn is predicated on a preexisting turn, or order of speech. To
speak out of turn means that you have spoken when it was not your turn to do so.
Scholar/artist Michele Wallace’s early work recognizes the revolutionary power of
“speaking out of turn,” and argues that speaking out of turn is the only “tradition”
available to the black female critical voice.
9
Art critic and curator Lucy Lippard invokes
this powerful stance in her essay about Wallace’s work.
10
Out of turn for Lippard can be

9
Michele Wallace. “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” in
Invisibility Blues: from Pop to Theory. (Verso: New York, 2009 (1990).
10
Lucy R. Lippard “Out of Turn,” in Transition: Under Review. No. 52 (1991) Indiana University
Press, pp. 144-150.
6
understood as, “outside the dizzying circle of white and male discourse.”
11
I reclaim this
historical phrase in order to further develop and revitalize the vocabulary necessary for
both intervening in western-centric discourses of art history and the study of visual
objects, as well as for discussing the interventions these objects make. New terminologies
help to facilitate new understandings within familiar spaces and around historical
conversations taking place in our contemporary moment. More broadly defined,
“speaking out of turn” connotes 1) speaking at the wrong time or in an undesignated
place, 2) saying something without authority, 3) making a remark/providing information
that is tactless or indiscreet, or 4) speaking without permission.
However, even a solicitation to speak does not guarantee that one can speak
uninterrupted, or that one will not be actively silenced in the process of said solicited
speech. Over 180 years ago, Maria W. Stewart, who was black, was the first American
woman to speak to a mixed public of men and women, blacks and whites.
12
Stewart, also
well known as the first African American woman to give regular public lectures, spoke
on topics that ranged from Abolition to women’s rights to religion. On February 27
th
,
1833, Stewart addressed the Boston chapter of the African Masonic Lodge, a men’s
fraternal organization. Her now infamous series of claims that men “lacked ambition and
requisite courage” to pursue the complete abolition of slavery and women’s rights caused
predictable uproar from the audience and abruptly ended her public speaking career.
13

11
Ibid.
12
Yolanda Williams Page (2007). Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, Volume 1.
ABC-CLIO. p. 536.
13
Maria W. Stewart, “An Address at the African Masonic Hall” (1833) --“I am sensible that
there are many highly intelligent gentlemen of color in these United States, in the force of whose
arguments, doubtless, I should discover my inferiority; but if they are blest with wit and talent,
friends and fortune, why have they not made themselves men of eminence, by striving to take all
the reproach that is cast upon the people of color, and in endeavoring to alleviate the woes of their
7
The uproar suggests that, while invited, her speech was out of turn and out of place. Thus,
Stewart had to be silenced. This moment in the 19
th
century, which included other
abolitionist enactments such as Frederick Douglass’s now widely acclaimed 1852 speech
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” point to what Sandoval observes as the
“paradoxical successes of the West’s imperial project,” which “meant becoming subject
to the speech of the colonized other; this expanding access to other ‘third’ world
language-scapes functioned to make ever more obvious the historically constructed limits
by which Western thought, psychology, and culture were bounded.”
14
In fact, Stewart’s
out of turn speech, and the subjection of white abolitionists to Douglass’s thorough
tongue-lashing can be understood as a momentary rupture, a deconstructionist breakdown
of western thought. The solicitation of marginalized language-scapes, and their halting or
redirectional tendencies can be followed through one of the West’s most integral
structures, the court of law. In American courtrooms in particular women, and non-white
women specifically, are asked to speak or provide testimony, only to be disrupted.
The study of law has demonstrated its concern with the voice and out of turn
speech, particularly from underrepresented and underserved communities, including
women. In one such example, “Speaking out of Turn: The Story of Josephine V,” legal
scholar Anthony Alfieri recounts the story of Josephine V., a 27- year old Hispanic
woman from an impoverished community who came into a dispute with the local Income
Maintenance (IM) Center over an application to add her newborn daughter to her public

brethren in bondage? Talk, without effort, is nothing you are abundantly capable, gentlemen, of
making yourselves men of distinction and this gross neglect, on your paper, causes my blood to
boil within me. Here is the grand cause, which hinders rise and progress of the people of color. It
is their want of laudable ambition and requisite courage.” - See more at:
http://www.blackpast.org/1833-maria-w-stewart-address-african-masonic-
hall#sthash.izqvt7hc.dpuf)
14
Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 6
8
assistance budget. Alfieri highlights the meaning and implications of her persistent ‘out
of turn’ speech acts at the Center and in the courtroom.
15
The young mother “testified
regarding the protracted struggle to add her infant daughter to the household budget, and
the testimony included a detailed description of the numerous bureaucratic obstacles
impeding that addition.” At the end of her testimony, Mrs. V. was interrupted by the
Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) when summarizing the nature of her petition for
reimbursement to cover of out-of-pocket expenses. The ALJ discounted her right to such
reimbursement and began a line of skeptical questioning, to which Mrs. V. demanded,
“Can I speak?” “Apparently surprised by her outburst, the ALJ withheld his questioning,
permitting Mrs. V. to speak without intrusion.”
16
As Alfieri illuminates, the story of
Josephine V. shows that the poverty lawyer’s ethic of suppression may be challenged by
the client’s ethic of vocal resistance. As her case demonstrates, there is a public tension
regarding the vocal suppression of particular bodies in American courtrooms, and the
resistance that may occur in fits, bursts, and starts. In these moments, those who have
been vocally suppressed in the face of the law may find occasion to speak out of turn.
Another more recent intersection of the law and what Jennifer Stoever has termed
“the sonic colorline” occurred during the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman trial,
expressly during the testimony of Rachel Jeantel.
17
Jeantel was the close friend of
murdered teen Trayvon Martin and was on the phone with him during his attack in 2012.
During the trial, a would-be 20-minute testimony turned into a grueling three-day
interrogation by both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, who interrupted, dissected,

15
Anthony V. Alfieri “Speaking out of Turn: The Story of Josephine V.” Georgetown Journal of
Legal Ethics 4 (1990): 619. (634).

16
Anthony V. Alfieri, “Speaking out of Turn…”, 643.

17
Jennifer Lynn Stoever. “Sounds of Race,” in ASE Conversations. March 27, 2015.
9
discredited, and condescended to Jeantel’s accounts given in African American
Vernacular English (AAVE). Jeantel, who was not offered a translator and refused to
code switch, was silenced and shamed for her both her out of turn presence and the
quality of her speech. Allowed to utter only fragmented words, thoughts, sentences,
Jeantel’s testimony was in turn chopped, restated, misstated, and mistranslated.
Importantly, the teen was repeatedly interrupted by her interrogators. From this
formulation and maintenance of a turn to speak, which encompasses the ways in which
one is permitted to speak, these examples reveal, that historically, it is always the white
heterosexual male’s turn to speak. And while these incidents of speaking out of turn do
not occur from within the white walls of an art museum, they mark an important legacy
in the silencing of people of color, and women in particular. Maria V. Stewart, Josephine
V., and Rachel Jeantel’s speech acts are performances that are hyper-visual and extra-
sonic in nature, and in many ways set a precedent and reveal the historicity of past and
future iterations.
Fred Moten has identified these precarious sonic performances against
persistently disruptive systemic violence as a kind of straining.
18
“That process is a
struggle toward language that tries to struggle toward things—it is movement in
preparation.”
19
Aligned with Moten, I am interested in what happens when the phonic

18
“With respect to C. L. R. James and José (Muñoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee
Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our
present. In this recording, this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the intensity of their
refrain, of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That optimism
always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse, which is, as Gayatri
Spivak says, the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the
regulative powers that resistance, that differing, call into being.” Fred Moten, “Black
Optimism/Black Operation” (2007)
19
Fred Moten In the Break: The Aesthetics of The Black Radical Tradition. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Introduction.
10
materiality of such exertions is considered through visual art objects. To invoke Saidiya
Hartman through Moten, I am drawn to the conjunction of race, gender, “and the
irreducible sounds of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection.”
20
In other
words, in the chapters that follow I examine direct address aesthetic works and moments
in which address or utterances are aggregated through specters of race and gender in the
visual.
Often, the visual realm and its registers are summoned to address the sonic. For
example, to term or to map a field of inquiry as a particular sonic landscape draws from
language historically utilized for analyzing a particular scene as something that is seen
and designated based on this sight—it is a label that relies on the ways space and scenic
variation tend to be visualized, and thus, organized.
21
This project attempts the
opposite—to recognize the analytic richness the sonic provides, and utilize speech and
voice, specifically, to assess visual art that may or may not incorporate actual sound.

“Fits, bursts, and starts”
A man with brown skin, a thick bushy mustache, and pursed lips that hold a spent
cigarette struts boisterously down a busy New York Street. He mumbles and murmurs
profanities, and cruising for white women, his dark curly hair a 6-inch crown around his
head and dark sunglasses framing his face, all of which visually (and sonically) draw him
out of any crowd. However, it is the noticeable bulge in his black pants that gives one
pause, sparks revulsion. Or perhaps, it is his speech: his broken and nonsensical phrases

20
Ibid., 1.
21
For important work on sound and space studies, see Josh Kun, “The Aural Border,” Theatre
Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000), 16. Also, Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
(Berkely: University of California Press, 2005), 1-2.
11
that came in “fits, bursts, and starts” that made spectators look away or reorient their
bodies away from his.
22
Whatever the response, this man, an ostensible “opposite” of the
artist who brought him to life in 1973: “a third-world, working-class, overtly hostile
male,” works against vocal and systematic societal suppression by speaking (and
existing) out of turn.
23

In her now infamous Mythic Being series, Adrian Piper deployed direct address
performance techniques in order to confront viewers with the evidence of their own
complicity with sexism, racism, and xenophobia. Engaging with popular representations,
the artist challenges viewers to assume personal responsibility for discrimination,
specifically for the “racist nightmare” Piper embodies as a middle-age multiethnic male.
24

Through the disruptive street performances of her Mythic Being character, Piper, works
against vocal suppression through the photographic stills overlaid with bold charcoal text
bubbles. “I embody everything you most hate and fear,” the photographic image utters
(FIG.1). The performing body speaks out of turn in the streets of New York confronting
viewing publics with their role in this man’s marginalization, and the images speak out
from the walls of the galleries in which they are hung, in similar fashion, disrupting
viewers’ experiences with fine art through confrontational text. It is the simultaneous
dealings between the visual texts (man and photographic image), and the sonic registers
(his mumbling speech and the charcoal text bubbles) that I suggest disrupt practices of

22
Here, I invoke Fred Moten’s work again to draw attention to the way these speech acts break or
work against vocal suppression.
23
Adrian Piper, “The Mythic Being: Getting Back,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. 1, (147).
24
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address,” in Adrian Piper:
Race, Gender, and Embodiment. (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2011), 258
12
viewing art, and as John Bowles posits, may start to coalesce an aesthetics of direct
address.
25

Moreover, it makes sense for this project to turn to the voice when studying artists
and their cultural products, which have historically been rendered both silent and
invisible. Thus, the analytic speaking out of turn seeks to capture both the radical nature
of these unsolicited, or, at the very least, resistant speech acts in American art and the
nuance of visual art objects existing against the grain of hegemonic contemporary art
discourses. The analytic also allows for the tension between the sonic and the visual to be
foregrounded as a critical methodology. To do this work, I rely heavily on several bodies
of literature that assess the voice and speech, as well as the implications of sonic
orientations and analysis on visual perception. Each of these central thematics has been
conceptualized in the fields of literature, cultural and sound studies, law, psychoanalysis,
feminist theory, film studies, and art history (to name a few).
26
These knowledge sets
inform my thinking of “out of turn presence” and “out of turn speech.” Taking an
important cue from scholars working in cinema, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and the
African American literary tradition, this dissertation invests in the voice as an important
site of inquiry, one whose history and theoretical effects open up radical shifts in our
conversations on visual objects.
Kaja Silverman bridges the intellectual spaces among cinema, feminist theory,
and psychoanalysis. In a moment when the feminist critique of classic cinema was
focused almost entirely on its obsession with the male gaze on women’s bodies,

25
Ibid.
26
Sarah Ahmed provides a succinct history of theorists who deploy such objects for
phenomenological meditation in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. First
Edition. (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006).
13
Silverman focuses instead on the complex ways women’s voices were being “extracted”
(often forcibly) from those same bodies. Silverman discusses the institutional
preoccupation with the male gaze in the 1970s and 80s, and how its tunnel vision
effectively misses theoretical attention on sexual difference as the consequence of
dominant cinema’s sonic and visual regime(s). She argues that the female voice is as
resolutely held to normative representations and functions, as is the female body.
27
Like
Silverman, I use sound and the analytic of speaking out of turn, as a formal base for
examining the ideological function of out of turn visual presence in the contemporary art
museum. Sharing another parallel site of inquiry, the dissertation also privileges the
speech acts and performances of women—more specifically, non-white women—and
how they have been situated in art history and theories of visibility.
In fact, Silverman traces what I understand to be an out of turn moment, a rupture
in the sonic regime of cinema when “the female voice seems to speak most out of the
‘reality’ of her body, [that] it is in fact most complexly contained within the diegesis.”
28

Silverman demonstrates that despite women existing as their bodies—as defined under
patriarchy—an existence demanding the linking of body and voice, a woman’s control
over her voice is still constantly wrested from her in cinema. Along with Silverman, I
argue that this seizure occurs in contemporary art history and criticism as well. For
example, art critic Donald Kuspit (1987) effectively evacuated Piper’s voice from his
essay, “Adrian Piper: Self-Healing through Meta-Art,” despite both verbal and written
conversations with the artist and her well-founded criticism and suggested revisions. The
piece, which was originally intended for Piper’s retrospective exhibition catalogue, was

27
Kaja Silverman. Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), viii
28
Ibid., 70-71
14
dropped during the conflict following its publication.
29
Kuspit published his essay in a
periodical he edited at the time, Art Criticism
30
despite the copious feedback he had
solicited from Piper regarding not only the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of her
work, but also the accuracy of his research and the intellectual rigor of his criticism.
31
His
decision to completely ignore all feedback demonstrates both an intellectual refusal of
Piper’s labor as both a scholar and an artist, as well as a violent silencing of Piper’s
dynamic creative practice, which he symptomatically dismissed through his criticism.
Silverman’s theory suggests that the control of Piper’s voice, the disavowal of her
intellectual labor, and the unwieldy and problematic use of Kuspit’s voice was necessary
to stave off male anxiety—perhaps, “another mechanism, analogous to suture, where by
the female subject is obliged to bear the double burden of lack—to absorb the male
Subject’s castration as well as her own.”
32
And while this dissertation does not utilize
psychoanalytic theory to form its analysis, the ways in which voice is deployed to assess
visual art finds familiar departures in Silverman’s re-theorizing several of the central
tenets in psychoanalytic thought.
When reading this example alongside Silverman, the ways in which much of art
history and criticism, and cinema in Silverman’s case, assert a kind of male control over
women’s voices physically, psychically, and discursively become apparent. Beyond
psychoanalytic discourse, African American and African Diasporic literary traditions
allow for another kind of understanding of speech. Mae G. Henderson (2014) provides a

29
Adrian Piper. Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987 [New York: The Alternative Museum,
1987]. The Museum, 1
st
Edition, 1987.
30
Donald Kuspit. “Adrian Piper: Self-Healing through Meta-Art,” Art Criticism, 3 no. 3
(September 1987), pp. 9-16
31
Adrian Piper. Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Art and Criticism. (MIT Press,
1999),107.
32
Ibid., 63
15
brief genealogy of speech acts as they emerge in the development of a modern African
American literary tradition. This formative moment, as Henderson underlines, “suggests
an alignment between contemporary sonic literacies and subjectivities and prior
theoretical models and paradigms grounded in colloquial language, speech, voice, orality,
storytelling, and singing.”
33
Throughout her recent work, Henderson expands on these
paradigmatic traditions of African American writing. The association of African
American writing with a “culture and tradition that has invoked the vernacular trope of
the “talking book” and generated critical tropes such as the “speakerly text” and the
“talking text” further signals a continuity between the oral and the written forms of black
American expressivity.”
34
Henderson highlights other tropes—ranging from the “call and
response” of Robert Stepto, to Henry Louis Gates’s “signifyin’,” Houston Baker’s
“bluesman,” Geneva Smitherman’s “talkin’ and testifyin’,” bell hooks’s “talking back,”
Cheryl Wall’s “worrying the line,”” and to her own “speaking in tongues.” All these
literary traditions affirm the power of voice and phonic articulation in the African
American literary tradition.
35
Most importantly, the critical emphasis of these African
American literary scholars reveals the liberatory compulsion involved in the deployment
of voice in a context in which black people have been historically subjected to violent
vocal suppression, often coupled with equally violent visual distortion and erasure.
36

33
Mae G. Henderson. Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 2.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
Chela Sandoval inspires an occasion to think through speaking out of turn as a neorhetoric of
existence. In her book, Sandoval provides seven ways to negotiate dominant systems of power,
all of which center rhetoric (speech and orality) as a means for deconstructing structures of
supremacy. Speaking and existing out of turn and through visual art objects can be comprehended
as a kind of insurgent methodology for outlasting various projects of supremacy, domination,
oppression, and exploitation. The works discussed throughout the dissertation agitate for a
16
Museums: Direct Address, an Aesthetic Strategy for “Talking Back”
“In many ways, I regard my marginality as more of a blessing than a curse, as
alienation, too, has its uses.” –Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical
Present I: Essay”

The relationship between communities of color and the American art museum has
historically been one of marginalization, exclusion, and invisibility.
37
Within the
museum, black and brown bodies, specifically those of artists, service workers and
museumgoers, become marked with a certain visibility, and yet their presence is
simultaneously rendered strange in these sites entrenched in a highly Eurocentric politics
of aesthetics. The artworks examined within the dissertation consider the duality of the
non-white body—hypervisible and yet “alien”/marginalized—within U.S. museums,
galleries and the art world more generally.
38

Like many nations, the U.S. preserves the past. From the spoils of war to the
confiscated objects and bodies mined abroad through imperialism, museums have been
used to collect and preserve artifacts of particular function and/or value. Art museums
exist for a similar purpose; however, their objects are almost exclusively acceptable or
legitimized works of art. This acceptance and legitimization occurs through a variety of
aesthetic and power related processes that commingle nation building and art historical
canonization projects.

revolutionary consciousness that can intervene in the forces of the aesthetic neocolonizing
multiculturalist postmodernism of this particular art historical moment. Chela Sandoval.
Methodologies of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print (3).
37
Bridget Cooks takes up this historical legacy in her book, Exhibiting Blackness: African
Americans and the American Art Museum (2011).
38
Howard Becker’s foundational text, Art Worlds (1982), sociologically examines art as
collective action. Becker explores and analyzes the cooperative networks of art world
participants, performers, dealers, critics, consumers, and artists that constitute a work of art. I
closely reconsider Becker’s text as a way of understanding the collective actions within art
networks that strategically exclude and/or purport black bodies to the convenient margins of
trendy diversity rhetoric and politics.
17
Carol Duncan (1991) outlines the history of art museums as part of ritual
citizenship—a demonstration that ultimately displays the “goodness” of particular
states.
39
Public art museums therefore become necessary fixtures of a “well-furnished
state.” Furthermore, a Western-style museum is the necessary façade of modernity, or
perhaps a revelation that imperial extraction is a central component of capitalist
modernity from the 19
th
century forward. Art museums in the West are almost always
constructed for Western eyes and are often used as a political strategy and/or as
propaganda for gaining monetary support. Duncan locates art museums within the realm
of secular knowledge, because of the branches of scientific and humanistic knowledge
practices embedded within them, such as conservation, art history, and archeology. This
designation is also assigned based on their status as preservers of the community’s
cultural heritage.
40

A museum also makes visible the communities it serves through the practice of
collecting and displaying material culture. Museums, through their organization of
material culture and programming, thus embody the processes by which individuals come
to understand themselves as citizens of particular communities and state entities. As
citizens, individuals become worthy recipients of history and culture in relation to the
state as benefactor or as giver and preserver of their history and culture. Museums
therefore participate in complex processes of national identity formation and transform
what was once historically a display of material wealth and status into spiritual wealth
and cultural capital for particular citizens, usually white, middle to upper class, and
educated. This line of thought is further activated within the context of the art museum

39
Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum
Display. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), 88.
40
Ibid., 90-91.
18
through assumptions that the work of art is the product of individual genius and worthy
of display.
41

The 1950s saw the emergence of a different kind of ritual experience that came
with the development of modern and contemporary art museums.
42
Artists began to
comment on the fact that “what we see and do not see in our most prestigious art
museums—and on what terms and whose authority we do or don’t see it—involves the
much larger questions of who constitutes the community and who shall exercise the
power to define its identity.”
43
Moreover, the museum effect is indicative of the ways in
which museums transform all objects into works of art. The “museum effect,” more
expressly, is a “way of seeing.”
44
Shannon Jackson (2011) traces the emergence of site-
specific and institutionally critical art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, and like Jennifer
González (2009), uses artists’ visual-spatial social commentary to mine the politics of
power and display embedded in the very sites of critique.
45
These practices addressed the
museum as a way of seeing, while critiquing what is seen and what is made visually
knowable within the same contexts.
The museum effect has a peculiar relationship with art that contains direct address
elements (especially those made by people of color). This was my experience when I

41
Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgment. 1790. Transl. James Creed Meredith.
42
Erika Doss. Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford History of Art). (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
43
Carol Duncan. “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The
Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), 99-
102.
44
Svetlana Alpers. “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), 26-27.
45
Other scholars such at Mabel Wilson (2012) have taken an alternative approach to space and
societal critique by demonstrating how black Americans in the late 19
th
century and early 20
th

century used community spaces as platforms for activism. Fairs and museums also play an
important role in the creation of African American identity. Fairs in particular, which were
designed to demonstrate African American progress, also reveal anxieties about participation in
the institutions African Americans had been historically banned from visiting or exhibiting in.
19
stepped into the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Los Angeles) in the fall of 2012
to see the exhibition Blues for Smoke, curated by Bennett Simpson. This interdisciplinary
exhibition explored an extensive range of music, contemporary art, film, and literature
through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetic.
46
The experience was overwhelming as
the space was filled wall-to-wall with visual material. I returned several times during the
show and found myself repeatedly drawn to the art of Lorraine O’Grady, Carrie Mae
Weems, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Adrian Piper, and Renée Green. Ultimately, their
work challenged the blues as a simple musical category, presenting it as a constellation of
creative sensibilities, while also challenging the ways in which the bodies—specifically
black bodies—are exhibited and engaged in the space of the museum.
47
For example,
Piper’s photographic piece, Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978), which was part of
Blues for Smoke, utilizes direct address audio installation to capture museumgoers in the
act of spectatorship as an act of visual trespass. Museum visitors find themselves
surrounded by empty walls as they approach an unassuming, unframed black and white
photograph covered by reflective glass. Overhead lighting illuminates viewers’ faces in
the glass as Piper’s audio voiceover reframes the act of looking through her haunting
commentary. Piper’s voice loops in the small white room, questioning and drawing
attention to the irony of looking as the viewer gazes at the photographic image of African
Americans descending a staircase—staring, pointing, in motion, but frozen in time. The

46
MOCA.org. Museum of Contemporary Art, 7 Jan. 2013. Web. 19 Jan. 2015.
47
Americans, alongside many nations, have a history of preserving the past. From the spoils of
war to the confiscated objects and bodies mined abroad through imperialism, museums have been
used to collect and preserve artifacts of particular function and/or value. Art museums exist in a
similar fashion; however, their objects are almost exclusively acceptable or legitimized works of
Art (with a capital ‘a’). This acceptance and legitimization takes place through a variety of
aesthetic and power related processes that comingle nation building and art historical
canonization projects. It is here that I also want to highlight the influential work of Clyde Woods
in this regard.
20
viewer’s existence as a spectator is called into question as s/he steps into the piece; hot
lights reflect the viewer’s own likeness in the mirrored glare of the photograph’s glass
frame.
“You want to have an aesthetic experience: to be fulfilled, elevated, edified,
irritated. You would like to have your criteria of good art confirmed, or disrupted,
or violated, by the art you see here…In looking at this picture, you carefully
monitor any subliminal or undisciplined reaction you have to this image of
assertive, aggressive, angry-looking blacks; they might be a part of the piece. It
fact, all your reactions, all your thoughts about what you’re now experiencing,
might be part of this piece.”
48

Piper draws attention to a staring contest one inevitably has with oneself—through the
subjects of the photograph. The viewer thus becomes a mediated and inherently
narcissistic subject; her own gaze moves through the subjects in the frame and rests on
her own reflection. Here, both direct address and the material of the glass function as a
participatory indictment. The viewers become an active part of the piece, and their
thoughts and reactions are all implicated in Piper’s practice. As Moten argues, “the
beholder is never estranged, never lost or even dark to himself; rather he continually
fulfills that self in the ascription of meaning to the beheld, and more fundamentally, in
the ascription of greatness or not, authentic and autonomous aestheticity or not, to the
artwork.”
49

Piper’s multi-genre experimentations challenge engagements with black bodies in
the contemporary art museum. Her artistic approach to issues involving race, gender,

48
Excerpt from installation monologue. Adrian Piper. Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma, 1978.
49
“The beholder arrives at the self-possessive sense or knowledge of self that is the essence of
what Fried calls conviction. The beholder becomes a subject again in this profoundly
antitheatrical moment. One isn’t absorbed by the painting as in an entrance into its scene; instead,
one is, in the instant of the frame, in the visual experience of greatness as an instantaneous
moment of framing, absorbed into or by greatness reconceived as a mirror. The painting is a
mirror. Absorption is self-absorption.” Fred Moten in In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black
Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
21
class and sexuality makes her art profound. When viewing the work, I felt subject to a
double haunting, coming to terms with the black bodies already present in the space and
visited upon by my own black reflection. For her audiences, Piper’s voice mercilessly
drones out the contradictions in spectator positionality—the complexities in one’s gaze
and the inevitable performance of looking at works of art, only to settle back upon one’s
image. Through this piece specifically, Piper questions viewers’ judgment and the
position from which they glance, pass aesthetic valuations, and then walk away.
Practices of direct address involve a variety of creative strategies, such as radical
self-portraiture, mixed- media performance, video installation, and word-based
amalgamations. Through her performance installations, contemporary multimedia
performance artist Coco Fusco is one of many artists who draw attention to the “scopic
power—and the limitations—of visualizing the racialized and gendered body” in
contemporary art spaces.
50
Similarly, artists Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper and Shirin
Neshat, whose work I also examine in this context, shock and disturb the viewer,
rupturing the membranes of silence and complacency surrounding race, gender, art, and
the politics of labor.
51
Other contemporary artists such as Tracey Rose and Kara Walker
also speak out of turn, and said of Walker: “provoke viewers to excavate, contemplate
and evaluate deep-seated collective and individual perpetuations of racism, sexism, and
homophobia.”
52
Thus, speaking out of turn as an analytic acknowledges this tradition of
women of color critical voices and provokes a conversation on the latent effects of

50
Nicole Fleetwood. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 31.
51
Lorraine Morales Cox. “A Performative Turn: Kara Walker’s Song of the South (2005)” in
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2007. (Taylor and Francis
Online), 79.
52
Ibid., 60.
22
unsolicited speech on audiences in the museum, a space for nation and cultural
citizenship building.
While there are hundreds of possible artists and any number of conversations to
be had on this particular research topic, it was the way these particular artists—Lorraine
O’Grady Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco Fusco—spoke out
from the walls of the art museums frequented during the research process, and the ways I
found myself as a spectator interpellated by and implicated in their works of art that has
led to this set of research questions. Speaking out of Turn assesses how their art
complicates spectator relations to art and viewing practices, theorizing the multisensory
ways direct address art reorients viewers to the raced and gendered subjects in the work.
The creative labor of speaking and existing out of turn impacts art museums through the
shifting spatial dynamics of institutionalized art exhibition. Taking seriously the
emerging field of museum studies alongside vitally important revisionist art and the
making of cultural history, Speaking out of Turn uses an interdisciplinary set of
approaches to explore the boundaries of direct address as an artistic strategy, in order to
examine how its disruptive tendencies have reoriented art’s history and display.

Who is Speaking? Who is Creating?
The artists discussed within the dissertation (O’Grady, Piper, Neshat, Weems, and
Fusco) by no means represent a formal group.
53
While all of these artists are women of

53
Women of color artists are not the only ones who take up the direct address strategies outlined
throughout the dissertation. Artists such as Glenn Ligon, Fred Wilson, William Pope L., and
James Luna also work within these artistic registers. While any artist can use direct address
strategies, these strategies become a technology of speaking out of turn specifically for women of
color, as I have argued in the preceding pages.
23
color, I argue that they are linked by a shared investment in critical approaches to art
making. I lay out speaking out of turn as a model for oppositional direct address artistic
practices in the contemporary moment. In mapping this model, I develop a methodology
by which art historians and cultural theorists might chart the coordinates through which
differing oppositional creative practices can meet, in spite of their varying trajectories.
54

All the artists have produced works across the range of strategies the dissertation
explores, and while their rise into prominence varies across the early 1970s to the 1990s,
each of the artists is still actively participating in today’s contemporary art conversations
and are arguably still investigating the boundaries of out of turn presence through their art
and scholarship. Making a simultaneous turn toward art spectators and appearing in
relatively quick succession, these projects include: Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (Piper
1978), Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (O’Grady 1980-83)
55
, Art is... (O’Grady 1983), Cornered
(Piper 1988), The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit the
West (Fusco 1992-1994), Sudaca Enterprises (Fusco 1997), and Turbulent (Neshat
1998). Taken together, these projects constitute vital examples of direct address art,
which by definition relies on the physical presence of a spectator in the production of its
meaning. They also demonstrate the ways that direct address art can be leveraged as a
technology for speaking out of turn.
This dissertation does not stray from central figures, but instead embraces them. I
focus on artists who have achieved a position of visibility within this context; however, I
hold this achievement in tension with the real need for critical attention on less visible

54
Here, my language is inspired by Chela Sandoval’s organizing principles for her chapter on
“U.S. Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement I” in her text Methodologies of the
Oppressed (2000).
55
Translates: Miss Black Middle Class
24
artists of color by examining radical out of turn existence and unsolicited speech. Part of
the larger issue around visibility and cultural reception of art made by women of color
artists is the weight placed on the cultural production of under represented people to
produce tangible effects. Whether those expected effects alter American histories,
particular communities’ access to creative capital, or entire systems of racial inequality,
these are in part aggregated through visual discourse. These results reflect the desire to
have visual art solve the very conundrum that it represents.
In 2014, the works of women artists continue to make up far less than half of all
contemporary art exhibitions and are less frequently considered within serious art
criticism or in major publications.
56
In 2010, a study showed that 83% of the artists in
prominent institutions such as the Tate Modern were men, along with 70% of those in the
Saatchi Gallery.
57
Non-white women are even more undervalued and understudied.
Speaking Out of Turn critically engages visual artworks produced by artists of color that
intervene in spectator relationships in contemporary art museums. The history of negation
across discourses of art history and art criticism, as well as the history of museums as
sites for projects of modernity, masculinity, whiteness, and nation building, opens up a
vital space to reconstruct this artistic category. U.S. peoples of color, artists in particular,
have long acted, spoken, intellectualized, and lived out what Cherríe Moraga has termed

56
Nicole Corrigan. “Sexism in American Art Museums,” in Apollon Ejournal, First Accessed
2014.
Jullian Steinhauer. “The Depressing Stats of the 2014 Whitney Biennial,” in Hyperallergic:
Sensitive to Art & its Discontents. November 15, 2013. ePublication. Accessed Fall 2014.
See also Maura Reilly’s “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes,” in Art News.
May 26, 2015. ePublication. Accessed June 25, 2016.
57
Kira Cochrane. “Women in Art: Why are all the ‘great’ Artists Men?” in The Guardian. May
24, 2013. Online Access.
25
“theories in the flesh,” a theoretical imperative that allows survival and more.
58
These
fleshy theories, disruptions, and interventions in the form of direct address art complicate
one-dimensional practices around viewing art and challenge aesthetic expectations that
have been historically embedded within museums and art galleries. Speaking out of Turn
reclaims these theories and expressive objects from the walls of contemporary art
museums where they have often been intercepted and depoliticized. While women of
color artists are often relegated to the margins of art history, I argue that their use of
direct address enmeshes them in the founding and preservation of such histories. I concur
with Sandoval that “the primary impulses and strains of critical theory and
interdisciplinary thought that emerged” in this twentieth century period “are the result of
transformative effects of oppressed speech upon dominant forms of perception” (e.g. the
contemporary art museum)—that new modes of critical art history and theory, the new
modes of decoding visual semiotics and analyzing visual texts “that have emerged during
the U.S. post-World War II period, are fundamentally linked to the voices of the
subordinated peoples” (emphasis my own).
59

I have chosen to focus on U.S. based artists who factor prominently in American
contemporary art museums and galleries for the purpose of tracing how direct address has
emerged as a strategy in U.S. art spaces. These practitioners open up productive ways for
me to historicize the methodology of speaking and existing out of turn through the
developments of an extremely young nation, and admittedly, a familiar context. Together
these artists represent a breadth of concerns as racially and ethnically diverse
practitioners, while also utilizing the strategy of direct address in differing aesthetic and

58
Chela Sandoval. Methodologies of the Oppressed, 7.
59
Ibid., 7-8.
26
political registers. Brought together in the dissertation, the artworks speak toward and
against the grain of cultural difference that defines these racially diverse women subjects
in a moment that is still dominated by white heteropatriarchal privilege in the
contemporary art world. Additionally, these artists and their work have had a
transformative influence on contemporary American art, changing the framework for
understanding what that classification entails. All four artists are based in the U.S. and
produce works that are exhibited predominantly in American galleries and museums.
However, they have also worked extensively internationally, exploring the social and
political structures and visual regimes that are common across diverse immigrant,
colonial, and postcolonial cultures. Indeed, the work of these artists reveals the fact that
the “nation” is not a stable concept with a stable location or a clearly defined subject-
citizen. In this regard and in the artists’ disruptive efforts, the works are a vital form of
deconstructionist U.S.-based art practice.
60

Artist Introductions
Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco
Fusco are interdisciplinary women-identified artists color,
61
all of whom conduct

60
Thus, I explore the significance of direct address as an artistic strategy in critical aesthetic
praxis of women of color artists from 1970s to today. In that time period, non-white and non-
western artists begin to figure more prominently in the American contemporary art world;
however, this dissertation and their work suggest that their presence is still one of complex
marginality and, often, invisibility. Throughout Speaking Out of Turn, I introduce and develop
concepts that are critically deployed to examination the space between unsolicited speech and
silence, unwelcome presence and invisibility, as well as art and the spectator, in order to trace
how direct address as a critical methodology opens up the space of the contemporary art museum
to alternative modes of inquiry, possibility, and ideological intervention.
61
Historian Loretta Ross reminds scholars and activists alike of the radical political history of
“women of color” self-naming and self-organizing in her lecture at the SisterSong, Women of
Color Reproductive Justice Collective Meeting. In the late 1970s, women of color became a
solidarity definition, a commitment to work and imagine collaboratively. It is this political
designation that gets reclaimed and repurposed in throughout the dissertation to signal the radical
27
dynamic historical research and practice a variety of cultural politics. Speaking Out of
Turn focuses on art made between 1970 and today, as this 45-year period captures the
hypervisible emergence of direct address art within contemporary art museums. It also
captures the evolution of both the artists’ practices and the technologies employed within
their art. Decades of self-portraits, mixed media performance works, installations, and
works that utilize text will be used to revise this moment in contemporary art’s history.
Artists O’Grady and Piper are most directly connected with the aesthetic genres of
conceptualization and mixed-media performance, and thus with direct address. Their
work emerges alongside artistic movements that some have located within a post-modern
moment. Both O’Grady and Piper introduce issues of race and gender into the vocabulary
of conceptualism, and explicitly political content into minimalism. Both artists do this
work primarily through direct address strategies and as a critical intervention in
Eurocentric aesthetic constructs, as well as across museums’ displays of raced and
gendered subjects.
Shirin Neshat, who was born in Iran and exiled to the U.S. in her late teens, works
primarily across film, video and photography. Through her unique family history,
relationship to processes of westernization, and her current exile in New York, Neshat’s
art becomes a textured site for the central concerns of this dissertation. Her dynamic films

possibilities inherent in this historic self-naming process. The writing also gestures toward the
possibilities for a kind of dialectic exercise in which diverse women of color artists are centered
both for political and theoretical meditation. I argue that despite artists’ individual differences and
particularity, “speaking out of turn” historically means something different and more acute for
women of color artists within systems of patriarchal dominance and intersecting sites of colonial
and capitalist oppression. Also, that when placed into critical dialogue, diverse women cultural
producers open up new and generative conversations regarding race and gender in contemporary
art museums.

28
and photography have been shown largely in Western art contexts, specifically within the
United States. Moreover, her use of a variety of direct address approaches is particularly
interesting when her audiences overwhelmingly do not speak Farsi, the language in
which Neshat choses communicate.
Carrie Mae Weems is another photographer who has troubled the boundaries of
medium specificity through her use of text, audio, fabric, and mixed media installations.
Weems takes up storytelling as a powerful method for existing out of turn and out of
history. Her art is complex, and her visual play with scale reorients audiences around her
works and facilitates the further troubling of particular dominant narratives over others.
Finally, Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American conceptual artist who works across
media to explore issues of race, gender, nation and citizenship. Speaking out of turn and
against the grain of anthropological display and museums designated for art and visual
culture, Fusco's work combines electronic media and performance through numerous
platforms. Her repertoire spans staged multi-media performances incorporating large
scale projections and closed circuit television to live performances streamed to the
internet that invite audiences to chart the course of action through chat interaction.
Each of the artists has offered critical articulations that contest the violent
silencing of women and non-white artists in American museums. Their work highlights
and confronts the ways racism and sexism persists as forms of visual and cultural
hegemony. Formally, the artists share materialist display and direct address techniques,
which will be discussed at length in the chapters that follow through the analytic to speak
out of turn. Conceptually, their works are committed to excavating the multifaceted
sociocultural relations that have defined raced and gendered bodies, access to and role(s)
29
within particular spaces, and the material conditions of subject formation in
predominantly western contexts as non-white subjects.
For the purpose of the dissertation, race and gender discourse can be understood
as the complex intersection of philosophies, regimes of representation, and systems of
enforcement that work in concert to define human beings as raced and gendered subject
categories. Specifically, the work of Michel Foucault is pivotal for addressing the
relationship between power and knowledge, and how both are implicated as forms of
social control through societal institutions, such as the American art museum. Moreover,
Foucault’s critical history and theorization of modernity has laid the groundwork for
many of the scholars discussed within my work, as well as my own understanding of the
role power plays in the evolution of artistic discourse within our society.
In the dissertation, race and gender are understood as discursive formations.
62

Arguing that race and gender are discursive formations, rather than essential biological,
or ontological categories, includes a recognition that these concepts undoubtedly shift
with the evolution of language, culture, and methods of representation. As Jennifer
González argues, “race discourse [and I add gender] is the politics of representation [in
museums, art, literature, popular culture, music, film, journalism, and other media] that
insists on presenting people as ‘racialized’ subjects.”
63
Additionally, black feminist
discourse has provided the theoretical foundation for such a politics of representation and

62
Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1969s to
the 1990s (Critical Social Thought). Second Edition. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 10
th
Anniversary
Edition. (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Sara Lynn McKinnon. The Discursive Formation of Gender in Women’s Gendered Claims to
U.S. Asylum. ProQuest LLC. 2008. Online Access.
63
Jennifer González. Subjects to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art.
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008), 3.
30
my own critical engagement, specifically around visual and material culture.
64
Moreover,
I recognize and historicize, alongside art historians Bridget Cooks and Mabel Wilson, art
museums’ functions in discourses and deployments of modernity, white supremacy, and
heteropatriarchy. Throughout this history, non-western subjects become both necessary
objects to uphold European whiteness and an aesthetic non-subject, excluded from artistic
merit and creative production.
65
As Speaking out of Turn traces the bounds of direct
address as artistic strategy, it must also acknowledge the long historical legacy of black
cultural politics within the United States. Practitioners such as Henry “Box” Brown and
Sojourner Truth take up direct address strategies as both aesthetic enactments and to
literally speak and exist “out of turn.”
66
As discussed earlier in the introduction through
the speech acts of Maria W. Stewart, Josephine V., and Rachel Jeantel, it is imperative to
explore artists who tap into this long history of existing “out of turn” as a means for
survival and creative being. The museum becomes a unique space for these histories and
strategies to take shape. The case studies I bring to bear illuminate, through contemporary
practices, nuanced and under-theorized aspects of a particular creative and aesthetic past.

Methodological and Theoretical Frameworks
This interdisciplinary project required a mixed-methodological approach of
historiography, auto-ethnography, phenomenology, and formal analysis. The vast
majority of my research took place in situ, where I spent hundreds of hours in participant

64
Specifically, the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Smith 1982, Audre Lorde 1984, Patricia
Hill Collins 1990, and bell hooks 1992.
65
Jan Nederveen Pierterse. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular
Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
66
Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-
1910. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
31
observation at museums across the U.S., particularly, museums and galleries in Los
Angeles and New York. Through the analytic of speaking out of turn, I offer a
reimagining of theories of interpellation, double-voice, the alienation effect, and
phenomenological orientation, as well as my concept of astride the lens.
Interpellation is a term coined by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to
describe the process by which ideology addresses individuals in specific sociocultural
locations.
67
Like Althusser, I am interested in the specific moment when one (a museum
spectator) realizes that the call made by the work of art is for oneself, and s/he becomes a
paricular kind of subject relative to the ideology of the space s/he inhabits.
68

Museumgoers are enmeshed in numerous discursive and social structures that to a
varying degree shape their individual identities. The concept of interpellation provides a
valuable framework for tracing moments where museumgoers react in perfect sync with,
or according to the ideological cues embedded within in each work of art.
69
This is
deepened when cues relate to individual psychology and character identification around

67
French Marxist philosopher Louis Althousser coined the term, interpellation, and describes the
process by which ideology addresses the individual. Althousser’s famous illustration of
interpellation’s function when a policeman shouts “Hey, you there!” and at least one individual
turns around, Althousser argues that the one who turns is most likely the one to which the call
was intended. It is at this moment when one realizes that the call is for oneself.
68
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation,” in La
Pensée, 1970.
69
Ideology in the Althusserian sense, is “the imaginary relation to the real conditions of
existence” (151). Drawing on the works of Freud, Lacan, and Gramsci in his foundational essay,
Althusser redefines both Marx and Engels’ notion of ideology as false consciousness. Ideology is
a set of ideas, a normative vision proposed by dominant societal actors, organizing its members
accordingly. Both Althusser and Fanon’s deployment of interpellation is predicated on dominant
ideological structures to which individuals are interpellated. However, this is not the case for the
artists presented in this project. Rather, art produced by women of color and its ideological
content exists outside of or at the margins of dominant or common sense logics. Thus, their
interpellative enactments function against the grain of established ideological structures,
rupturing the steady current of signification, and recapturing spectators through alternative
ideological processes and to do radically different work.
Althusser, Louis, La Pensée (1970), 151.
32
race and gender.
70
Franz Fanon elaborates on this formulation with an experience of his
own. A young child in a public square cries, “Look, a Negro!” to which Fanon becomes
locked in as a subject of racism as he realizes he is the only black person present.
71
Both
Althusser and Fanon’s writings suggest that there is limited choice in this matter. Thus, it
is the theoretical notion of being locked in as a subject that is explored, specifically in
chapter two, when discussing text art and the act of reading.
72

Perhaps the interpellative work I imagine these artists performing is also closely
connected to what Sandoval terms as differential oppositional consciousness, in that
differential resistance functions very much like Althusser’s hoped-for but unacheived
1960s “science and ideology,” when “the differential form of cognitive mapping is used,
it is the citizen-subject who interpellates, who calls up ideology.”
73
This is opposed to, or
moves away from Althusser’s formulation, in which it is “ideology that interpellates the
subject.” For an artist to deploy differential oppositional consciousness through her work,
she can depend on no (traditional) mode of belief in her own subject position or ideology;
“nevertheless, such positions or beliefs are called up and utilized in order to constitute
whatever forms of subjectivity are necessary to act in and also (now obviously)
constituted social world.”
74
These ideological processes—the ways in which my
theorizing builds and then moves away from Althusser, Fanon, and Sandoval—and the
function of ideology within museums will be further explored in Chapter 2.

70
Peter Brooker. A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory (Student Reference). (Hodder Education
Publishers. 1
st
Edition, 1999).
71
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
72
Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) is instructive here
and in Chapter 2.
73
Chela Sandoval. Methodologies of the Oppressed, 31.
74
Ibid.
33
Another building block in the theoretical scaffolding of this project is the
alienation effect, as it is particularly useful in its innovative technique of making “the
familiar strange” in order to provoke a socio-critical audience response.
75
Theatre
practitioner and theorist Bertolt Brecht was discontented with the ways in which modern
theatre manipulated audiences, and thus sought to disrupt this emotional manipulation by
replacing it with a surprising jolt/gesture. Developed in 1936 in “Alienation Effects in
Chinese Acting,” the effect was described as “playing in such a way that the audience
was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play.”
76
The
alienation effect is characterized by the use of theatre and performance techniques
designed to disrupt and distance spectators from emotional involvement in the production
through jolting or surprising reminders of its constructed nature. Some of Brecht’s
earliest techniques included the projection of illustrations on screens or boards;
explanatory captions; performers breaking character to narrate, lecture, or sing; and stage
designs that are not representative of specific localities, but rather, as discussed in
Chapter 1 around Weems’ work, expose the mechanisms of production (such as ropes
and lighting) in order to maintain spectator awareness of the constructed nature of the
performance.
The impetus behind such techniques is the control over the spectator’s
identification with both performers and plot; thus, they can more clearly discern the lived
in world and/or the political stakes inherent in the performance. Brecht used direct
address, among other stretegies—commonly referred to as “breaking the fourth wall”—to
expose technologies of production to his audiences, and to expose the unjust social power

75
Brecht, Bertolt (John Willet). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. 1964.
76
John Willet, trs. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. (Hill and Wang
Publishing 13
th
Edition, 1977), 91.
34
relationships embedded in particular narrative structures (social gest). I read direct
address art as this kind of disruption, and understand the work as making the familiar
space of the art museum and the process of viewing art strange and highly politicized.
Even though there is no prescribed formula for creating contemporary art, there is a set of
tacit expectations of art spectatorship—a set of socialized behaviors and cues one
practices when making one’s way around/through a given art space. This set of
expectations and spectator performances informs my analysis of theories of direct address
art.
A close attention to the literature in phenomenology is equally important for
discussing the structures of experience and consciousness in art museums and through the
artworks themselves. If phenomenology can be understood as a turn toward objects,
77

then this dissertation radically reconceives this movement using art objects, specifically
those which can be said to speak or invoke vocality. For both Judith Butler and Althusser,
turning is crucial to subject formation.
78
So then, what does it mean when a work of art
causes one to “turn”—to oscillate between visual culture and visual/spatial/social
contexts? German philosopher Martin Heidegger theorized a subject’s turning within
space and the process of familiarity as a kind of orientation. He writes, “[t]he concept of
‘orientation’ allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space—that is, how space is
dependent on bodily inhabitance.”
79
Or as Butler summarizes this relationship and
possible actions:
[T]he phenomenological theory of “acts,” espoused by Edmund Husserl, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead, among others, seeks to explain the

77
Sarah Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006).
78
(1997c:33).
79
Sarah Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology, 6.
35
mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language,
gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign. Though phenomenology
sometimes appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent
prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts), there is
also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as
an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.”
80

I reframe these complex spectator relationships in Chapter 1 by theorizing the act of
speaking and spectators inclination to turn using video installation. Spectator relations are
contextualized in this chapter through a kind of embodied dialogue or exchange—
specifically, this exchange is enmeshed in historical and ideological subject/object
positions and expectations. I theorize the potential work art does to phenomenologically
situate spectators in the interstices between subject and object as Butler suggests.
In my final chapter, I introduce the notion of creatively existing “astride the lens”
using the radical self-portraiture of O’Grady, Weems, Neshat, and Fusco. Looking more
closely at artists who take on their own bodies as objects/subjects within their work, I
examine a moment of being caught astride the lens. This instance emerges when artists
stand both behind and in front of camera lenses, their bodies repositioned within
predominantly Western and masculinist gazes, while also constructing new modes of
voyeristic existence within the visual field. Astride the lens as a direct address strategy
intentionally connotes sexualized pleasure, creative play, as well as sexual violence,
while theorizing how the physical labor of these women artists working “double duty”
across modes of creative production shapes and informs what we see and what we know
of the subject matter represented in their art.
Ultimately, this project is motivated by several key questions. 1) What is
“speaking out of turn” in the context of the American art museum? 2) What are some of

80
Judith Butler. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory,” in Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988), 519-31.
36
the prominent critical sites and/or mediums? 3) How have the artists discussed in the
dissertation revolutionized the practice of direct address? 4) What is the potential for
artworks to intervene in spectator relationships and what are the results of those
interventions?

Chapter Breakdown
The project moves through various sites where direct address strategies figure
prominently. Chapter 1, “On Turning: Video Installation & the Question of Orientation,”
draws upon the concept of phenomenological orientation in order to theorize the effects
of direct address video installation works on spectators. I examine the artistic strategies of
Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, and Carrie Mae Weems and bodily encounters with their
work in order to argue that audio/video installations about race and gender intervene in
practices and performances of viewing art in U.S. contemporary art museums.
Specifically, I provide close readings of Piper’s Cornered (1988), Neshat’s Turbulent
(1998), and Weems’ Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008).
Phenomenology is central to this chapter as a critical methodology, one that the artists
themselves and I deploy through the use of turning as a way of producing both
orientation and disorientation. Finally, this chapter also takes seriously the potential for
these projects to fail, which I argue, makes the concept of turning richer.
Chapter 2, “Mark My Words,” examines the role of text within visual artworks
through a reconceptualization of Althusser’s theory of interpellation and critical
engagement with Russuan philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s “double-voice.” This chapter
locates the use of text within visual art as a distinctive direct address mechanism that
37
issues a call for spectators through the process of reading. Arguing that these textual
amalgamations are rooted in artists’ of color artistic practices, this chapter also explores
uses of text in artworks that speak, quite literally, in the language of the oppressed when
actual voices are silenced. In other words, intellectual and cultural producers of color
have been historically silenced and their contributions rendered invisible, and I examine
several objects that linguistically claim visual space for themselves and challenge a
history of vocal (and visual) suppression. In this chapter, I draw upon O’Grady, Piper,
and Weems, all of whom utilize text as a strategic device within their direct address
artworks. Specifically, I use Cutting Out the New York Times (O’Grady 1977), Vanilla
Nightmares (Piper 1986); and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems
1995-1996).
Chapter 3, “A Room of One’s Own: White Walls and Alien Bodies,” traces four
pioneering performance artworks by artists Lorraine O’Grady and Coco Fusco, who draw
from the history and conditions of social, political, and cultural alienation within the
contemporary art world to speak and to exist out of turn. I examine the ways mixed-
media “props” such as O’Grady’s white gloves (Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire 1980-83’) and
gold frames (Art Is…1983), and Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s gold cage (Two
Undiscovered Amerindians visit the West 1992-94’) and Fusco’s interrogation room (A
Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America 2006-08’) become the
mechanisms through which the artists stage or subvert their own alienating presence as
subject/object and artist/performer/art. They use these objects to make space and to stop
time, which in turn produces a turn for their mixed media enactments. Through these four
objects (cage, glove, room, frame), which each signify covering, and/or create space for
38
the body of color to inhabit, O’Grady and Fusco “make strange” the processes of making
and exhibiting contemporary art.
Chapter 4, “Astride the Lens: Radical Self-Portraiture” investigates the practice of
self-portraiture as taken up by Piper and Weems, as well as emerging artists Delphine
Diallo and Zanele Muholi. The process of self-portraiture—staging the representation of
one’s own body—is an important artistic practice to explore and analyze because of the
ways artists are taking up space, and speaking out of turn. Historically, the act of self-
portraiture is particularly meaningful to artists of color precisely because it has proven an
important means of psychic negotiation, amendment, and intervention within
dehumanizing and negating visual registers. In this chapter I introduce my own concept
of artists existing astride the lens, which seeks to address the labor involved in staging the
self for visual capture. Astride the lens understands a moment when artists move and
exist in the space on either side of the camera. This existence is complex, opening up
both the liberatory potential for pleasure and visual play, while also potentially
reinscribing fraught politics of the voyeristic gaze and opening bodies up to sexual
violence. Finally, Chapter 4 connects previous conversations in Chapters 1-3 about the
possibility for art objects acting as surrogates for the artist themselves, and how we might
understand the strategy of direct address when the artist positions her own body’s image
in order to do the work of communicating sans the physical performance of her voice or
embodied presence.
Speaking Out of Turn concludes with a loop back to the introduction’s discussion
of Adrian Piper’s Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma, along with some observations on artist
Kara Walker’s haunting presence throughout the dissertation process, specifically, her
39
recent work, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and
overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the
Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar
Refining Plant. I will end the dissertation with these two artists and their objects in a
conversation that parallels dialogues on the rise of departments of ethnic studies, gender
and sexuality studies within universities and public institutions at this pivotal moment the
dissertation covers. Like direct address art, these progressive moves both disrupt and are
constitutive of institutional power and global capitalism.
81
Throughout the dissertation, I
discuss the possibilities and limitations of direct address art presented in fine art
museums and galleries across the United States. In Chapters 1-3 in particular, I examine
what it means for works to “fail” or meet unexpected challenges in audience reception.
In the Conclusion reiterate the power and potential of direct address artworks for causing
disruption and catalyzing a politics of reorientation within western-centered art
establishments. I consider, in a Foucaultian sense, how power is creative, consensual, and
coersive at once. The artworks presented throughout the dissertation are explored for
their disruptive power and their potential as orientating devices, but also for the
multifarious ways the works are also constitutive of art world power and global
capitalism, which continue to erase and silence a vast majority of artists of color and
women.

81
Roderick Ferguson. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority
Difference (Difference Incorporated). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
CHAPTER ONE: On Turning: Video Installation and the Question of
Orientation

If we know where we are when we turn this way or that way, then we are
orientated. We have our bearings. We know what to do to get to this place or to
that place. To be orientated is also to be turned toward certain objects, those that
help us to find our way. These are the objects we recognize, that when we face
them we know which way we are facing. They might be landmarks or other
familiar signs that give us our anchoring points. They gather on the ground, and
they create a ground upon which we can gather. And yet, objects gather quite
differently, creating different grounds. –Sara Ahmed

My first physical encounter with Adrian Piper’s legendary video installation
Cornered took place in 2014, at The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum’s exhibition Take
It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology. The show was deemed “the first large-scale
exhibition to focus on the intersection of two vitally important genres of contemporary
art: appropriation (taking and recasting existing images, forms, and styles from mass-
media and fine art sources) and institutional critique (scrutinizing and confronting
structures and practices of our social, cultural, and political institutions).”
1
First exhibited
at the John Weber Gallery (New York) in 1988, Cornered, a single-channel video
installation, features a 16 minute and 20 second video played on a color monitor, which
sat behind an overturned table and framed by two birth certificates (FIG.2). The 2014
Hammer installation was situated in the corner of the gallery with six chairs organized in
a triangular formation in front of the monitor. I entered the space on a busy afternoon and
spent an hour wandering the galleries of the exhibit, not knowing that Piper’s piece
would capture and hold my attention for several hours thereafter.

1
This language comes from the exhibition materials itself and reveals how the museum was
thinking and situating the works included. For more information, visit the museum’s online
archive: http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2014/take-it-or-leave-it-institution-image-ideology/
41
Although I had been previously familiar with this specific work, I still found
myself captivated by Piper’s emotionless and calculated voice, her blue dress (often
described as conservative) and pearls, even 26 years (my entire lifetime) after it had
originally been exhibited. The artist’s poised, forever 40-year-old gaze held mine as she
made a familiar statement: “I’m black.” The statement was familiar because it is one of
my own. Staring into the grainy face of Piper’s light complexion I saw and heard myself,
and I braced as I looked around the gallery for the expected disbelief. I was alone. The
handful of people who had entered the room with me were nowhere to be found. I turned
my eyes back to the screen. It was just Piper and myself. She continued: “Now let’s deal
with this social fact and the fact of my stating it together... It’s not just my problem, it’s
our problem.” Indeed. Our problem.
In this chapter, I analyze the phenomenological orientations of works by Piper,
Shirin Neshat, and Carrie Mae Weems, and argue that each installation evidences the
artists’ own use of turning, and opens up potential readings of their work through a
critical examination of turning—possibilities I trace in order to understand the
significance of direct address video installations’ impact on contemporary art museums
and spectators. Specifically, I provide close readings of Piper’s Cornered (1988),
Neshat’s Turbulent (1998), and Weems’ Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the
Moment (2008). Phenomenology is central to this chapter as a critical methodology, one
that the artists themselves deploy, and I analyze, through the use of turning as a way of
producing both orientation and disorientation.
Installation is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often created
with an attention to their site-specificity and that enable artists to transform spaces
42
through visual work. Installation art, as it is understood today, emerged in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, when the form saw exponential technological development in a moment
of great social and cultural movement. Closely related to the temporal arts, such as dance,
theatre, performance art, music, and cinema, as well as the plastic arts, installation is
predicated on an immersive experience and reworks the common expectation of art on
gallery walls in order to pose the question of art in space. Thus, the term installation art,
“has been used increasingly since the 1960s to denote temporary, site-specific art works
designed to surround or interact with the spectator and/or extant architecture in a given
exhibition space.”
2

Installation art and critical acts of out of turn existence and speech share a
historical legacy and trajectory. Both experience a dramatic increase in public visibility in
the 1950s and 1960s in the wake of Civil Rights era protests and performances, so it is no
coincidence that installation art is especially well suited to engage in institutional critique
and disruption. Jennifer González argues that installation art offers a frame to examine
the processes of both subject formation and/or the subjection of human subjects in the
larger social history of people and things. Installation, for González, can become the site
for the critical restaging of these processes—spaces of subjection.
3
However, the use of
the catalyzing energies of social movement and public political action—speaking out of
turn—as a critical methodology of the oppressed, silenced, and invisible, can be traced

2
Jennifer González. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art.
(Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008), 7.
3
Ibid., 10.
43
back to earlier interventions in cultural display, long before the emergence of modern
installation technologies of fine art exhibition.
4

As both Bridget R. Cooks and Mabel Wilson demonstrate in their work, early
exhibition practices of African American’s cultural production, which can be read as
functioning out of turn and against mainstream history, set the foundation for
installation’s site-specific, immersive, and disruptive potential.
5
At the same time, early
expos and fairs were predecessors to ethnically specific cultural centers and place-based
historical societies and institutions. Thus, it is in relation to this historical vein that I
understand the installation practices and performances of the artists’ work addressed in
this chapter in order to highlight that the strategy of speaking out of turn does not exist in
a cultural/political vacuum. Rather, I see the ruptures produced by these video

4
African Americans and other marginalized groups were producing their own visual art and pop-
up installations even in the late nineteenth century, when the World’s Fairs emerged in the U.S.
as early national exhibitions promoting an idealized view of Western modernity and progress. By
the 1890s, entire “Negro Buildings” were part of larger World’s Fairs, and Emancipation
expositions and grassroots black museums had emerged. “Negro Buildings” were designated sites
within World’s Fairs where African Americans would curate public history, culture, modern
invention, and stage lectures and performances. (Mabel Wilson. Negro Building. N.p.
www.ucpress.edu. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.) These cultural exhibitions, which featured a variety of
installations, quite literally spoke and made visible the progress and ingenuity of a people, and
did so through the immersive experience of the fairground, convention hall, and/or makeshift
gallery space. These against-the-grain and revisionist cultural displays claimed space for an
innovative black existence in the midst of an historical moment predicated on black exclusion
from the sites of cultural modernity, which largely rendered blacks as primitive zoological
curiosities rather than an innovative force at the vanguard of Western progress. These
sophisticated early displays were site-specific and often environmental in nature, and had been
developed and practiced long before contemporary art emerged as an art historical moment or a
legitimized artistic genre. Their site-specificity was largely conceptualized either around the
established centers of World’s and county fairs, as a revisionist gesture in the case of “Negro
Buildings,” or specific to Detroit and Chicago metropoles in1940, as two of the largest
Emancipation Expositions. Grassroots museums sprinkled the country and pop-up exhibitions
took on environmental significance during traveling festivals, and along the long roads of
freedom marches and demonstrations.
5
Mabel Wilson. Negro Building.
Bridget Cooks. “Fixing Race: Visual Representations of African Americans at the World’s
Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” in Patterns of Prejudice. Vol. 41, Issue 7 (2007), pp.
435-465.
44
installations as inheriting and participating in this complex historical legacy of disruption,
intervention, and site-specific display.
According to Gónzalez, “...[a]ny definition of installation art must minimally
include a consideration of location, site, gallery, public, environment, space, time, and
duration. In this way the term can be used to link artworks that have very little in
common formally, but that share a commitment to certain conceptual goals.”
6
Installation
art has historically disrupted the traditional semiotic and somatic boundaries assumed to
exist between the audience, the work of art, the site of exhibition, and the world beyond.
7

While all installation art shares this historical trajectory, direct address video installations
often utilize audio and video technologies, which further activate and engage spectators
around particular conceptual goals. These works in particular were selected also for their
use of turning as an aesthetic intervention—both the works’ incorporation of turns and
their ability to compel turns both ideological and bodily. I read these audio/visual works
as disrupting the traditional self-guided museum experience by recalibrating spectator
relations to art objects and the museum galleries in which the objects are exhibited.
If speaking out of turn can be understood as a methodology developed out of the
historical condition of being silenced and rendered invisible—one that gets executed in
the contemporary moment through direct address visual art—then I explore the artistic
genre of installation, specifically video installation, in order to pose the
phenomenological question of how objects that break this silence and claim visibility
affect the orientation of museum spectators and spaces. Said another way, the notion of

6
Jennifer Gonzáles has written the principal book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in
Contemporary Installation Art, which addresses the use of installation by artists of color towards
critical ends (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008), 7.
7
Victor Burgin’s 1969 essay, “Situational Aesthetics,” argues for a new way of reading the
concerns of conceptual, temporary, and site-specific or event-specific works of art.
45
out of turn speech is predicated on a preexisting turn, or order of communication, and I
am concerned with this turn as both a question of phenomenological ordering and as a
spectator-subject orientation to these installed and potentially disruptive creative
modalities. Taking my cue from Sara Ahmed, whose theory of spatial orientation has
been important to exploring the link between identity and strategies of manipulating
space, I examine the turn and orientation in order to understand speaking out of turn as
materialized through direct address art specifically as it is situated in time and space in
installation art, and to theorize with “whom” and/or “what” these visual works enter into
contemporary art spaces. In different ways, both González and Ahmed are the connective
tissue of this chapter. The central concerns of out of turn video art works (“the
turn”/turning), and their relation to spaces and spectators (orientation), in many ways are
phenomenological questions—ones that are posed when considering, in greater depth and
analysis the work of these women.
Reading Arjun Appadurai: “We have to follow the things themselves, for their
meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.”
8
If phenomenology
turns us toward particular art objects, in terms of how they reveal themselves in the
present and in contemporary art museums, then we may also need to “follow” these
objects—spend quality and extended time “in their vicinity.” Here, I also think of Kellie
Jones’ work as she discusses growing up immersed in a world of writers, artists, and
musicians, absorbed in both the aesthetics and politics of black art. Jones’ curatorial
sensibility is shaped by her ability to follow these particular objects, to inhabit space with

8
Sara Ahmed also cites Appadurai in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
(2006) and my thinking on new materialism and phenomenology is in direct dialogue her text
(39). Appadurai (1998: 5).
46
both art and artists alike from a very young age.
9
We may need to supplement
phenomenology with an “ethnography of things”—an ethnography of art objects.
10

Which is exactly the position I have found myself when studying these installations—
between ethnography and phenomenology.

Video Installation & Phenomenology
11

The category of video art installation represents many sub-genres and categories,
each with its own distinct manifestations.
12
Akin to the hybrid, spontaneous, and
oftentimes improvisational nature of out of turn speech acts, video art can be seen as an
inherently hybrid technological enactment, one that works in and against specific
representational sites. For instance, video art shares a common visual technology and
visual semiotics with broadcast television, but the relationship between the two mediums

9
Kellie Jones. EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011).
10
Arjun Appadurai in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. And Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others. First Edition. (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 39.
11
“[W]hat art does is philosophically significant.” –Joseph D. Parry and Mark Wrathall
“Every exhibiting of an entity in such a way that it shows itself in itself may, with formal
legitimacy, be called ‘phenomenology.’” –Martin Heidegger
12
During the period under consideration, “there has been an extraordinarily rapid development in
electronic and digital imaging technology. These advances in the field, made by artists and
technology developers alike, have evolved the medium of video from an exclusive and costly tool
only accessible to specialists, particularly large corporations, broadcasters, and institutions, into a
pervasive and conventional consumer product. During this time video technology and the
emergent video art object emerged from an activity on the periphery “to become arguably the
most influential medium in contemporary art.”
12
In Installation Art (1996) Nicolas De Oliveira,
Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry chart a historical continuum from the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk (or “total” work of art), to nineteenth-century world fairs, to the later
performances, exhibitions, and working philosophies particular to Futurism, Dada,
Constructivism, and the Bauhaus (each of which called for the collaboration and interdependence
between art forms such as painting, sculpture, and architecture), to Minimalism and conceptual
art’s dematerialization of the aesthetic object. Video art, however, further troubles these
distinctions between the plastic arts and the temporal when its channel format meets sculptural
form and an installation politic within ever-shifting contemporary art discourses.
47
is complex. In fact, this relationship is not an entirely unfamiliar terrain of struggle in
marginalized communities. That is, video art has often been seen as the subversive
counterpart to broadcast television’s consumer driven content. Using a similar
technological apparatus, video artists have sought to trouble both the content produced
and the technological processes of its production. Perhaps not unrelatedly, black visual
and literary traditions have also always had to negotiate representational terrains of
struggle through the technologies of language and writing, as well as visual technologies
such as photography. That is, black artists and writers have always had to negotiate the
use of colonial or “master’s tools” in such intimate and complex discourses.
13
It is
precisely this struggle, I argue, that makes video installation an important and necessary
medium through which to explore the mode of speaking out of turn, as a means for
problematizing evolving technologies and their fraught histories of violent distortion and
erasure.
The argumentative arc of this chapter is multi-layered. As an underlying current, I
suggest, along with Steven Crowell, that phenomenology might be uniquely well suited
to “account for why [technological] art matters to us,” specifically when used as a
communicative modality.
14
In order to explore the significance of such a statement, I
perform three phenomenological close readings of three artists’ work—each reading
advancing its own theoretical arguments.
I discuss Adrian Piper’s Cornered and Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent to make a case
for video installation’s capacity to turn the spectator’s body and reorient the space of the
museum. I analyze Carrie Mae Weems’ capacity to “turn” critical and historical focus in

13
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” (1984).
14
Steven Crowell, “Phenomenology and aesthetics; or, why art matters,” in Art and
Phenomenology (ed. Joseph D. Parry). (New York: Routledge, 2011), 31.
48
her work Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment. Specifically, I use
phenomenology to understand what it means for these artists to create works that compel
critical and bodily turns within the museum when the artists’ turn itself can be understood
as historically out of order, out of place, or disruptive in nature. My approach to these
visual objects is to treat them as a kind of phenomenology. As Joseph D. Parry and Mark
Wrathall put it in their “Introduction” to Art and Phenomenology, this “is not to say that
art can be reduced to a discursive content, but rather that art can function as a way of
directing us to important phenomena and helping us to understand them on their own
terms.”
15
Said another way, I understand the video installations presented within this
chapter as doing phenomenology. When considering the phenomenology of visual
experience (my own experience), video installations are not merely objects or
representations of objects and phenomena; rather as Steven Crowell puts it, “they are
deconstructions of such objects, representations that make explicit the phenomenological
elements of their own constitution.”
16
I am interested in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s central
preoccupation in his phenomenological essays from the 1940s-1960s, “Indirect Language
and the Voices of Silence,” “Eye and Mind,” and “Cezanne’s Doubt,” which is the
instruction art can give us about the nature of our embodied perceptual engagement with
the world and with others. According to Merleau-Ponty, “art and only art” can do this.
17

15
Joseph D. Parry and Mark Wrathall, “Introduction,” in Art and Phenomenology (ed. Joseph D.
Parry). (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1.
16
Steven Crowell, “Phenomenology and aesthetics,” 40.
17
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in J.M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception,
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 57.
-“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. R. Mcleary, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Here, Amelia Jones’ work on Merleau-Ponty and his significance for art historical discourse is
also extremely useful and can be found in her chapter “The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s
49
For Merleau-Ponty, art is a fundamentally bodily initiative, one that encompasses
discipline, creativity, and technique. Indeed, art is creatively conceived and physically
developed by an individual or group; that is, the process is embodied, as is the process of
viewing that which has been made and presented as art.
Throughout the discussion, I am less concerned with unpacking the meaning or
the content alone of each work of art, although I will do some of this throughout for
clarity’s sake. Art historians and critics have already done this work, especially for the art
of Piper.
18
Instead, I seek to establish some of the vital elements or conditions for seeing
something as out of turn—in particular, the complex way in which our apprehension of
art, video-installation, and the vocality of the non-white female body yields a layered
consciousness of the visual art object(s) and the subject(s) these objects contain. Toward
this end, phenomenological meditation on the purpose or meaning-making behind video
installation must be undertaken prior to any attempt to analyze the necessary and
sufficient conditions for applying the concept “out of turn” to some elements of that
experience. A phenomenological approach gets this work done.
The study of phenomenology is largely concerned with human perception in
relation to objects and spaces, and seemingly quotidian material objects have brought this
study of consciousness into greater relief. Infamously, phenomenology has been linked to
tables, chairs, paper, writing desks, and rosy hued mugs, to name a few. So it may be no
coincidence that the three works of art discussed in the chapter also compositionally
contain many of these objects, despite my selecting them for entirely different reasons.
Significantly, the materials of the art objects matter, and I am interested in how these

Phenomenology in Art History,” Art and Thought, Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (eds.)
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 71-90.
18
For example, see John Bowles’ work Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (2011).
50
implements (table, chairs, etc.) 1) function and collide on the horizon (background) of our
consciousness, and 2) produce disorientation and facilitate bodily turns. With the help of
Ahmed, I ask: how does the orientation of video art, which is in the contemporary art
museum, function as an orientation device, which both makes evident the “direction” of
spectators and also takes them in certain directions?
19
By reflecting specifically on video
art installation as an artistic expression that is significant in contemporary art museums, I
offer an account of racialized (and gendered) common sense as orientated.
20
By
considering the ways in which out of turn video praxis makes visible how Western
contemporary art museums “face a certain direction,” which is predicated on the
foregrounding of some “things” (objects/subjects) and the relegating of other “things” to
the background, I use phenomenology to demonstrate how the contemporary art museum
may be racialized (and gendered) as a form of institutional function.
21
That is, as western
art museums emerged as the house of singular, masculine, “artistic genius,” the natural
history museum arose to house “the primitive,” less sophisticated (perhaps even
feminine) other. So while this historical connection is subliminal, its reality is not
absolved in the creation of the contemporary art museum. That is, its established function
or “occupation” might be that of suppressed or underlying racism and sexism.
When asking who is speaking and what is being transmitted, it is also critical to
ask who is being addressed? Posed another way: who faces the contemporary art

19
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 26.
20
Here, I use common sense in the way Kara Keeling understands the term, which refers
“simultaneously to a shared set of motor contrivances that affect subjective perceptions and to a
collective set of memory-images that includes experiences, knowledges, traditions, and so on…”
in The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 14.
21
By function, I mean to draw attention this history of the museum operating institutionally
towards racialized and gendered exclusion.
51
museum? Adopting Ahmed’s language for the situation of the art museum, does the
contemporary art museum have a face, one that “points it toward some bodies rather than
others?”
22
If such practices of facing depend on relegating specific socio-economic
groups to the background, then the answer to this question would not simply involve a
biographical account of who is present, but would consider how other forms of social
orientation affect how bodies arrive at the museum. Ahmed provides a blueprint for
considering the way in which social orientation forecloses certain orientative
positioning—certain social positions and possibilities—through her discussion of
phenomenology’s gendered occlusion of women. Understanding writing as the primary
nexus for theoretical labor, Ahmed, utilizing the work of Edmund Husserl, meticulously
distills “how being directed toward some objects and not others involves a more general
orientation toward the world.”
23
She reveals how social position and spatial position are
inextricably linked using Husserl’s orientation to the writing desk, which occludes both
the labor needed to produce the desk and the labor of his wife that affords him time and
space to write. It is this direction towards objects that I want to consider in this chapter
mainly because I believe this examination will allow us to address one of the central
questions this dissertation poses: Do the direct address works made by women of color
artists disrupt and/or challenge the practices of viewing art in contemporary art
museums? And if so, how do these disruptions orient, disorient, or reorient art spectators?
Importantly, “the objects we direct our attention toward reveal the direction we
have taken in life. Other objects, and indeed spaces, are relegated to the background; they

22
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 31.
23
Edmund Husserl. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. (London: Routledge,
2012). Originally published 1913.
52
are only ever co-perceived.”
24
This is to say that just as contemporary art museums can
be understood as orientated toward art and capital in specific ways that privilege western,
masculine, white, and exclusively legitimized conceptions of art and aesthetic
value/worth, so too are their “would be” visitors, who may be socially oriented to labor,
culture, and leisure based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. As Merleau-
Ponty elucidates, art is uniquely situated to help us understand our perceptual
engagements and these multifaceted orientations in the world. He argues that this is due
to artists' ability to become attuned to the means by which the world is structured for our
visual perception, and thus, is in the position to orient us (spectators) through the pictorial
work to the processes of this structuring. The artwork itself performs a kind of
phenomenology insofar as it demonstrates the phenomena (the perceptual structuring of
the world) in such a way that we can understand it more explicitly than we did prior to
our encounter. Thus, art with a phenomenological component built-in, such as
installation, becomes a way to foreground structures of identification and meaning.
Take an installation such as Adrian Piper’s Cornered, for instance, which is
composed of chairs, an overturned table, video monitor, and two birth certificates.
25
Its
placement in the corner and against the bare white walls of the gallery performs an initial
gesture of deconstructive contextualization: these objects resist aesthetic appreciation or
interpretation that would construe them as something purely for passive engagement,
because they have been removed from the kind of horizon—the everyday world/everyday
experience within art museums—whose references support the narrative sort of meaning

24
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 32.
25
Cornered (1988) is a single-channel video installation with monitor, overturned table, ten
chairs, and framed photocopies of two birth certificates for Piper’s father, part of the permanent
collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
53
that normally enables us to experience these objects as either functional or art. Rather,
Piper stages these objects in a way that highlights how we come to see and know
particular bodies as raced, and this is done through the spectator’s bodily engagement
with the arranged objects, as well as through the explicit content of the video itself.
Piper’s performance, demeanor, and her meticulously selected language is recorded and
then projected on the video monitor, which also works to position the spectator. The
piece makes a display of its own visual experience, and thus facilitates a kind of
phenomenological experimentation on, and within, its spectators.

Racialized Bodily Orientation
“How do bodies ‘matter’ in what objects do?” –Sarah Ahmed

In the 16 minutes following Piper’s bold, seemingly random pronouncement in
the installation Cornered, Piper meticulously “corners” the viewers as she shifts her
monologue from one about the abject practice/performance of passing for white to a
critical attack on the whiteness of her presumed audience. Citing the historically
significant “one drop rule” for deducing racial “purity,” Piper confronts the viewer with:
“You are probably black...What are you going to do?” Furthermore, by implicating
viewers through her rhetorical line of questioning, Piper stages a performance of herself
as object or visual curiosity for inspection and scrutiny, “but in a way that ultimately
reveals less about the artist than about the viewer's own attitudes toward race.”
26
Over the
years, several scholars have completed the necessary and important work of analyzing the
content of Piper’s message in Cornered and the implications of such an openly

26
John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper, 10, see endnote.
54
interpellative work. For example, John Bowles, whose impressive 2011 book Adrian
Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment spans Piper’s life and practice, does this work
thoroughly and convincingly. Rather than rehearse a similar reading of this work, I turn
to phenomenology and the phenomenological work of Cornered in order to say
something new about racialized bodily orientation, the act of “turning,” and the ways in
which works like Piper’s can be understood as existing “out of turn” through their direct
address approach, as well as viewers’ tendency to “turn away” from them.
My experience at The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum serves as a good
example. During my period of observation, I never saw anyone take one of the provided
seats. Several spectators stood at the margins of the installation, listening for a minute or
two before taking their leave, others walked up to the table examining the structural
components of the installation’s setup. And finally, as I myself stood behind the last row
of chairs and watched Piper on the monitor for the entirety of the piece, one other young
woman also approached the piece, stood to the right of the middle row of chairs and
watched along with me. This spectator was the only person I observed in my four-hour
participant observation who stayed throughout Piper’s entire monologue. Perhaps it was
coincidence, or perhaps it was my own body in the space that shaped other bodily
engagements with the piece. My only regret is that I did not stage a “sit in,” because
perhaps if I had sat rather than stood during my research in-situ, my actions might have
compelled other actions and engagements with the piece. The installation’s form solicits
a kind of extended engagement by providing chairs, chairs I did not take even though my
engagement was indeed prolonged. And while my seated engagement was not prevented
by the museum itself, I wonder retrospectively how the space may have prevented me
55
from sitting down. Did I feel like I would be in the way of others viewing or interacting
with the piece? Did the ebb and flow of people walking through the galleries necessitate
my shifting gallery stance? I will never know, thus the regret of not thinking to explore
these possibilities and limitations through the staged durational mode of the sit in.
Ahmed’s interventions in theories of sexuality and sexual orientations provide the
blueprints for building my understanding of other difficult locations, such as racial
orientations. In other words, even though race is not usually discussed as an orienting
device, with the help of Ahmed, I believe it is productive to consider the possibilities of
race in these terms. Beyond narrow binaries of black and white, and racist and not racist,
together with Adrian Piper’s Cornered, Ahmed offers critical insights for comprehending
racial orientation and racialized logics as spectators come into contact with direct address
art, specifically, art that speaks out of turn. Like Martin Heidegger’s famous reading of
van Gogh’s well-known painting of a worn pair of shoes in his 1935 essay “The Origin of
the Work of Art,” my reading of Piper’s Cornered points to a kind of experience: this
video installation was speaking. Or, as Heidegger stated of Van Gogh’s painting: “In the
vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.”
27
It is
this kind of experience that I, along with Heidegger, explore phenomenologically—
moving away from the limiting experience of art that takes place when we thematize the
work as an object solely for art historical analysis or critical estimation. Rather, to further
invoke Heidegger through Steven Crowell, the sort of experience “we have when we live

27
Martin Heidegger. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian
Young and Kenneth Haynes. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-56.
56
with a work of art, dwell ‘in the vicinity’ of the work and ‘preserve its ability to
speak.’”
28

The remainder of Heidegger’s essay is less helpful for advancing my argument
about how and what art is meaningful and my assertion that art is a distinctive way of
doing phenomenology. Nevertheless, this claim that van Gogh’s painting of the pair of
shoes spoke—revealed the being or truth of their existence and function—is particularly
interesting to consider in the context of this dissertation. Exploring this possibility, in
what follows, I shall rely on my own experience “in the vicinity” of Adrian Piper’s video
installation in order to address the physical turns spectators took in the Hammer museum,
making the argument that racism is a kind of repetitive strain injury (RSI) inscribed on
the body and inflicted through a continuous “turning away.”
29

There are several important possibilities, and of course, limitations, for
formulating racism as an orienting device, one that might produce physical symptoms on
the body and perhaps even injury. One crucial implication of this formulation is that, if
turning is an embodied and observable reaction to art that engages with raced or gendered
subject matter, one (the researcher) could observe spectator orientations towards
particular works as a function of larger socio-cultural and political orientations. Indeed,
one could extend this logic to observe how physical accumulation of these orientating
actions around race can produce physical injury on the psychological body: racism.
30

28
Steven Crowell, “Phenomenology and aesthetics, 44.
29
I was introduced to the medical term repetitive strain injury (RSI) through Ahmed in Queer
Phenomenology, 57. However, Ahmed uses RSI to discuss the gendered implications of the
affects of repeated tasks and gendered labor on the body, while I use it here to discuss the racial
implications of “turning away” from certain works of art.
30
This reading is also inspired by Judith Butler’s theories of gender constitution and identity
formation as “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Further, just as Butler theorizes how
gender is instituted “through the stylization of the body, and hence, must be understood as the
57
Admittedly, the utopic possibility of such a suggestive theoretical reading is that this
“strain injury” might then be diagnosed and treated. Or as Butler proposes for subverting
gendered identity constitution, the possibilities for transformation—out of limiting and
problematic gender strictures or out of limiting and problematic racial ideologies—is in
“arbitrary relation between such acts” that provide “the possibility of a different sort of
repeating, in the breaking or subversive repletion of that style.”
31
One obvious limitation
then is that art, video installation specifically, is not a diagnostic tool. Also, it is
necessary to recognize that individuals “turn away” from art for innumerable reasons, and
it would be fairly difficult to tie each spectator’s physical desire to turn away back to
their presumably racist psyche. This too is a limitation found within Piper’s installation:
the assumption that everyone who encounters the piece is white (for I am not), and that
all white spectators have the same relationship to blackness that she so meticulously
outlines.
32

mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute
the illusion of an abiding gendered self,” perhaps similar mundane bodily gestures, movements,
and enactments might also be considered in terms of understanding how racism might also
require “a conception of a constituted social temporality?” (Butler, 1988)
31
Ibid. Judith Butler in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” (1988)
32
Another important limitation I observed was people’s inclination to actually engage with the
work. Spectators rarely stayed long enough to listen to Piper’s monologue, let along sit down and
get comfortable enough to be made uncomfortable or disorientated. Most people would enter the
room, making their way around to other pieces that shared the space with Piper’s, before turning
away to leave. In their movement through the gallery, few would stop to listen to whatever
portion of Piper’s monologue they happened upon. Almost as if prompted, spectators would stop,
glance, and then turn away. Others would move to get a closer look at the framed birth
certificates, perhaps meander around the chairs, and check behind the table before also turning
away. It was a constant flow—a processional—of people entering the space and then turning
away before hearing that Piper “is Black,” or learning that they probably are too. While this
limitation in Piper’s own phenomenological experimentation occurs at the level of spectator
engagement (a failure to incite the anticipated discomfort and rage), the installation provides an
opportunity to witness another kind of response, and that was one of turning, specifically, turning
away.

58
Finally, I discuss the possibilities and limitations for works like Cornered to
re/orient the contemporary museum. The phenomenology accomplished in Piper’s
installation, I argue, teaches us something that Heidegger’s discursive phenomenology of
art and “thinghood” is in principle incapable of expressing. In Piper's installation—“in its
vicinity” as Heidegger says—we are able to think what ordinarily eludes us and what
apparently eluded Heidegger's philosophical reflection: the “truth” or meaning of the
state of the art object (thinghood) that subtends the useful. Through Piper, spectators gain
understanding through the experience of the devices, or “things” of racism—an
experience contained within organized implements such as the chairs, overturned table,
television monitor, and framed birth certificates. As a researcher, I also had a similar
experience; however, my understanding (my consciousness) was directed toward the
ways viewers foreclosed their own, in a compulsive tendency to turn away from Piper’s
video—the chairs remained empty and birth certificates unexamined.
Ahmed suggests that the orientation of objects is shaped by what objects allow
one to do, and she considers how the actions afforded by objects take place in space.
Nearness is necessary for action to take place, and an object’s vicinity can be understood
in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s comment that “I see it only if it is within the radius of my
action”.
33
Ahmed recognizes that while objects, and in this case, video installations, must
be near enough to spectators to complete specific actions (such as sit in one of Piper’s
chairs or turn from screen to screen in Neshat’s Turbulent), such actions are what also
bring objects near to spectators.
34
Action, such as sitting in one of the provided chairs,
brings bodies near to objects (perhaps the video or the certificates), and nearness

33
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), 7.
34
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 52.
59
facilitates actions with objects (sitting, standing, touching). Action thus depends on how
bodies (specifically spectators) reside in the space of the contemporary art museum with
video installations. Furthermore, when spectators sit in the chair—they are facing
forward—they are facing the corner of the gallery. If they are seated in the chair facing
forward, they are facing the overturned table, the video screen, and Piper. As the chair
directs both their sitting and their gaze, it opens up certain possibilities for further action,
such as listening, processing, becoming enraged, and perhaps, acting on that rage. Thus,
the critical relationship between action and space is imperative, as both space and action
function as determinates of what is possible.
Much of Piper’s work leaves the viewer aware of his or her own responsibility for
racism. Activity in the spaces where Piper’s work resides is also restricted by those very
spaces. For example, because most of Piper’s work is exhibited in the context of
contemporary art museums, spectators must (or usually do) adhere to certain spoken and
unspoken behaviors and expectations. Whereas some spectators might verbally lash out at
Piper in everyday conversation, or make their discomfort and displeasure audible in the
context of a lecture or public forum, they are differently inclined in their actions within
art galleries. Spectators might remain silent, or at least discreet in their remarks when
they otherwise would respond differently. Or, as Lefebvre suggests: “space ‘decides’
what actually may occur, but even this ‘decision’ has limits placed upon it.”
35
So while I
suggest that through the method of speaking out of turn Piper’s work disrupts racialized
common sense logics and bodily orientations within the space of the museum, the gallery
space itself is shaped by a decision (perhaps by the artist, or by the curator) that this space

35
Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Transl. by D. Nicholson-Smith. (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1991), 143.

60
is for this kind of work (or not), which in turn determines what actions are possible. This
microcosm of possibility is also directly shaped by an entire repertoire of overdetermined
concepts, such as, “art,” the “artist,” the museum, etc.—all of which inform the space of
the actual room that is the gallery in which Piper’s work and others are displayed.
Action, in this sense, involves a close co-dwelling among objects and bodies that
is orchestrated by the artist. Ahmed and Merleau-Ponty remind us that objects and bodies
are not the same when existing in space. Bodies inhabit space differently and both bodies
and objects activate, or perform and circumscribe action, to different degrees. With this
information, other provocations are also possible. For example, what do we do with
“bodies” embedded in “things” that are also in a particular space? And, what do we make
of Piper’s body in the object of the TV monitor, “on” screen contained within the work of
art, which resides in the space of the contemporary art museum? Can objects within a
phenomenological approach be considered as a kind of prosthetic extension of artists’
bodies? How might racial re/orientations be catalyzed by the art-presence of racialized
objects/subjects embedded in video installation? While I am not in the position to address
each of these queries individually in the context of this chapter, I connect them with the
central ideas and concerns I do address of orientation as a process directing or redirecting
consciousness toward (or away from) particular objects, subjects, and bodies within the
space of contemporary art museums.
Throughout the duration of the installation’s video, Piper details personal
experiences with racism and elaborates the decisions she is continually forced to make as
a light-skinned woman who appears white to most people she encounters. The
confrontational nature of the piece is largely predicated on the artist’s ascription of
61
responsibility for both these choices and the racism she faces onto the spectator. Piper
meticulously shifts the issue of passing for white onto those spectators who do not
consider themselves black by presenting the historical and genetic probability that most
Americans have at least some black ancestry.
36
This is a risky approach for Piper and, as
Bowles alerts us, “the results of confronting viewers with the responsibility for racism
and its effects can include violence.”
37
The construction of Cornered makes it clear that
the artist anticipates such a response from spectators. Addressing viewers at a distance,
and “removed by video’s technology of time delay and transportability, her wariness [is]
figured by the arrangement of a video monitor displayed in the corner of the gallery or
museum, atop a table turned defensively on its side.”
38
Assuming that spectators chose to
sit and listen to Piper’s monologue in the chairs provided—as noted, these chairs have
been arranged in a triangular formation facing the screen—the overturned table is
preparation for a mounting assault against the artist. Perhaps the gesture of the capsized
table, as we will see below, also functions as a repelling force—one that wards off the
spectator—or produces an atmosphere of inaccessibility, or feeling of trespass.
If bodies are shaped by their contact with objects, and as Ahmed observes, “what
is near enough to be reached,” very few spectators came near enough for Piper to “reach”
them. The bodies of spectators have the potential to take shape through contact with
Cornered, or take the shape of that contact—reshape themselves. “What gets near is both
shaped by what bodies do”—sit, stand, listen, or engage—“which in turn affects what
bodies can do”—orient, shape, reshape, and/or respond.
39
By reading Cornered

36
John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper, 10.
37
Ibid., 11.
38
Ibid.
39
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
62
phenomenologically, or even by understanding Cornered as a phenomenological
intervention, we get an ideas of how being directed toward some objects—existing “near
enough” or “in the vicinity”—involves a more general orientation toward a larger
contemporary art context, and perhaps the world. My observations of Piper’s work in the
context of the Hammer show also exemplifies how some (othered) objects, “and indeed
spaces, are relegated to the background” of the contemporary art experience. They are
passed by as spectators move in and out of galleries. They are speaking, but is anyone
listening? A fundamental limitation is that they are only ever co-perceived.
40

However, all was not lost in this ethnographic phenomenological exercise. In fact,
this proclivity to “turn away” reveals a different kind of “truth.” In the Heideggarian
sense, Cornered speaks literally and figuratively because of its way of revealing and
managing normally occluded horizons of the familiar (the contemporary art museum), in
which what it means to be racist (or not) is constituted. Race has been constituted within
the space of the gallery through its history of display as curio rather than as something
that “matters.” Race is constituted in the absences and/or silences of raced and gendered
art world participants. Over and over again, race is constituted through systems of
aesthetics, value, and order; racism is constituted in the body as immanent straining,
caused in the repetitive action of turning away from the work of race and race hierarchy
itself. Piper puts a different spin on this history and the constitution of race in
contemporary art by bringing her own body to the fore as subject/object for examination.
Taking Piper’s important cue, I use phenomenology to explore how bodies, and, I
argue, how art objects are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment,
their posture, and their gestures. Ahmed reminds us that both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,

40
Ibid., 33.
63
after all, describe bodily horizons as “sedimented histories.”
41
This model of history as
bodily sedimentation has been taken up by social theorists; for Pierre Bourdieu, for
example, such histories are described as the habitus, as “systems of durable, transposable,
dispositions”
42
which integrate past experiences through the very “matrix of perceptions,
appreciations and actions” that are necessary to accomplish “infinitely diversified
tasks.”
43
For Judith Butler, it is precisely how phenomenology exposes the
“sedimentation” of history in the repetition of bodily action that makes it a useful
resource for feminism.
44
What spectators tend to do in the space of the contemporary art
museum are effects of histories rather than spontaneous or originary actions or responses.
Here, as Ahmed points out, Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) is an interesting
prognosis to work through because of its physical (and psychic) implications in relation
to the body.
45
In the medical sense, RSI can be understood as the condition in which the
prolonged performance of repetitive actions causes particular effects in and on the body.
When actions are repeated over and over again, whether that is due in part by the work
that we do or the ways in which we are mobile in the world, bodies take the shape of its
repetitive occurrence—“we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of this work.”
46

Divorcing, momentarily, RSI from its physical effects on the body, I want to consider
how racism and indifference might produce a kind of RSI trace in the psychological
body. This occurs through the repetitive (and often physical) act of “turning away” from

41
Ibid. Sarah Ahmed addresses the issue of sedimented histories in her text, but see also
Steinbock (1995: 36).
42
Quotations were pulled from Ahmed’s discussion but can also be found in Pierre Bourdieu
(1977:72).
43
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 83.
44
Judith Bulter. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. (Redwood City: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
45
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 57.
46
Ibid. Emphasis in original.
64
the work of engaging race discourse, or the voices of those affected. My experience
observing the rhythmic turning away from Piper’s Cornered, was illuminating because I,
like Piper, expected to witness a defensive (and perhaps violent) response, but instead
saw an unexpected turn, and that was a turn away.
Cornered is about orienting spectators (by seating them in chairs in front of a
television monitor) inevitably towards something they want to (and do) turn away from,
and that is race and the issue of racism. Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent, on the other hand, is
about disorientation, a refusal predicated on the spectator’s bodily turns within the space.
While Piper’s piece seeks to orient audiences (or reveals their prior orientations),
Neshat’s installation disorients spectators through another kind of physical turning in the
gallery, as well as the critical turning of the camera.

Disorder and Re/orientation
47

Turbulent (1998) is the first of three short films in photographer Shirin Neshat’s
film trilogy exploring the culture of the chador in Islamic Iran (FIG.3).
48
Turbulent, like
Rapture and Fervor (1999) is a two-channel black and white film; however, the two
screens are displayed on opposing walls, instead of being projected side-by-side. In
Turbulent, Neshat draws upon the viewer’s bodily engagement: the ability to turn within
the space, change position, and observe transformation in one’s experience of the piece.

47
“Turning toward an object turns “me” in this way or that, even if that “turn” does not involve a
conscious act of interpretation or judgment” –Sara Ahmed
“The behind is here the “point” of deviation, such that when Husserl considers what is behind his
back, he is turning his attention away from what he faces” –Sara Ahmed
48
Mostly worn by Muslim women in Iran, the chador is a large piece of cloth that is arranged
around the head and upper body leaving only the face exposed. For an extensive history, culture,
and politic of the chador see:

65
Neshat’s work both reveals aspects of an unfolding narrative and closely resembles an
experiment in the psychology of vision and the aural.
This 10-minute video project continues Neshat’s earlier explorations of gender in
her native Iranian culture, specifically the social custom of male public performance, and
the prohibition of public performance for women. The first screen opens with the
enlivened sound of stringed instruments as the camera leads the viewers to scan an
auditorium filled with seated male spectators. In the foreground, a male performer (Shoja
Azari) faces the camera with his back to the audience and begins to lip-sync a poem by
Rumi (1207-73), performed by the rich and impassioned voice of Shahram Nazeri. Once
focused on the male performer, the camera remains stationary—parallel to the ground
and affixed on both the central figure and his male audience. On the opposing wall of the
gallery, a single veiled woman stands motionless, facing an empty concert hall with her
back to the camera. The male spectators listen attentively to the male performer and once
the music comes to an end, they applaud generously. As the male performer finally turns
towards his seated audience and takes his bow, a low rumbling distracts him. He slowly
turns back to the camera, to his museum audience, and looks and listens toward the
opposite wall. On the opposing screen the camera is still focused on the back of the
veiled woman, performed by acclaimed Iranian composer and vocalist Sussan Deyhim.
As Deyhim starts her performance, the camera slowly pans, revolving around her,
revealing her face and, soon, her dynamic gestures as she vocalizes a wide range of tonal
and sonic expression (FIG.4). The breadth and complexity of her vocals transform and
shift from guttural vibrations, melodic cadences, pulsing vocal runs, visceral wails, and
breathy screeches that fill the gallery space, avoiding narrative capture within the bounds
66
of a singular song. The audio echoes and oscillates between her solos and electronically
constructed and overlaid harmonies, however, further complicating these sonic acts. As
her exclamations build, the viewer’s vantage point is swept up in whirlwind panoply
around the vocalist’s body, caught in the frenzy of the sonic and the visual performance.
During the performance—which lasts nearly six minutes—Azari’s gaze is seemingly
transfixed by Deyhim’s dramatic presence and passionate movements. In some exhibition
contexts, this moment of recognition and orientation has been paired with the opening
lines of Furogh Farrokhazad’s poem, “Another Birth”:
My whole being as a dark chant
which will carry you
perpetuating you
to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming…
49

The avant-garde spectator-less performance that is caught on screen works in
contrast with the technically adept lip-syncing and conservative performance of a
traditional (folk) song. It is in this opposing setup that Neshat begins to probe the binary
relations between male and female, light and dark, fullness and emptiness, fixity and
motion, tradition and its deviation. Viewers’ movements are directed, the exhibition
framing forcing spectators to just keep turning. And it is in this turning—and in
Deyhim’s “out of turn” vocal performance—that we can explore questions of the
phenomenological orientation of the art’s spectator. Closer to Husserl’s transcendental
turn, Neshat forces her viewers to direct their consciousness toward one of two very
different gendered performances. Making this choice, we are able to reflect on our own
consciousness and the ways in which it structures our experience of and within Turbulent.

49
Furogh Farrokhazad, M. Hillman, and K. Emani, Once Again, Another Birth: Poems (Tehran,
1999), 19. This two-channel poetic personification subverts the social customs of a
fundamentalist moment in Iran, while also undermining musical and performance conventions
with her hybrid sonic enactment.
67
Dizzying physical turns catalyze disorientation in Neshat’s video installation, along with
the disorderly cultural context of Deyhim’s out of turn body.
I saw this piece as an undergraduate as part of my contemporary art history senior
seminar. To this day I remember how I felt in that dark room full of white students (I was
one of maybe two people of color in my class) watching the exchange between the two
individuals on the screens. The way we were forced to divide our attention was
unnerving; every time our eyes swept from screen to screen they inevitably swept over
those with whom we inhabited the space. I went home that night and watched it on
YouTube a dozen more times, mesmerized by the sounds, by the apparent need for the
female vocalist to be heard despite the emptiness of the on-screen venue. In my fervor to
hold these sounds and images in my mind and to understand their meaning, I called one
of my closest friends among my undergraduate colleagues, who happened to be Iranian
American. She sat with me, and the two of us pored over the YouTube footage until I felt
a kind of familiarity watching the haunting black and white images as she translated the
poem. I had been interpellated, perhaps unknowingly, but as my engagement increased,
so too did my orientation toward the work. This is not to say that the disorientation, or the
interpellative nature of the piece, was completely lost on my classmates, only perhaps,
the cultural meaning of the disorientation—meaning that eluded me even as I sought it
out.
In Ideas I, Husserl presents phenomenological discourse with what is understood
as a transcendental turn. Taking on the Kantian expression of “transcendental idealism,”
Husserl locates possibilities of knowledge and/or consciousness in the broadest sense,
turning away from any reality beyond phenomena—or experiences. What is most useful
68
in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological turn is his definition of consciousness as a
consciousness of something (say, race or racism as in Cornered). That is, consciousness
is directed toward something; it is intentional as opposed to unintentional or automatic.
Consciousness does not happen to us; rather, it is directed by us.
50
This is important for
exploring art objects, because we thereby turn or direct our attention, in reflection of (or,
perhaps in response to) the structure of our own conscious experience. Others have
discussed this turn toward certain objects over others in relation to taste. An artistic or
aesthetic taste is generally discussed as a kind of sixth and perhaps developed (or even
inherited) sense, an affinity toward, or perception and enjoyment of what is considered
“beautiful,” excellent, fitting, or harmonious. Instead, I suggest that phenomenology
allows us to understand the taste for, or turn towards, art objects as something more
complexly situated at the level of both consciousness and orientation. Understanding this
directedness in terms of spectator engagement with contemporary art opens up
possibilities for qualifying statements such as, “the art world is racist” (and sexist, for that
matter). Said another way, I am suggesting that phenomenology might help us understand
things like taste and distaste for art objects as an orientation, rather than a personal
choice. This then can help qualify and/or mediate blanket statements like “the art world is
racist,” or “the art world is sexist,” and may open up new or different possibilities for
[re]orientation, disorientation, and/or individuals and spaces to be differently orientated
to underrepresented creative praxis and art objects. If Cornered can be understood as
staging a kind of phenomenological experiment to address race and the possibilities for
[re]orientation, and perhaps, diagnosis—then Turbulent stages another kind of turning.

50
Edmund Husserl. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931). Transl. by W.R.
Boyce Gibson. (New York: Routledge, 2002).
69
In the dark room, the gallery, my own consciousness was directed at both the
screens and my classmates who were also in the space. Forced to oscillate between the
visual work and my own cultural context (as well as the cultural context of Neshat’s
work), my attempts at directedness were refused, causing intrigue, disorientation, and
panic. What are these white students thinking? What am I thinking? Who is this woman?
What is she wearing? What are these sounds she is making? What is the man doing—can
he hear her—does he understand? Back and forth, back and forth; I turned my body from
screen to screen, to a peer’s face, to screen, to face, to screen. Even while I was in my
own home with my friend with Youtube on repeat, Neshat’s work refused us orientation.
Even with the translation of the male vocalists’ performance, Deyhim’s words and
sounds are incoherent. Even with the two-channel screens located neatly together on the
computer monitor, Deyhim’s body does not stop turning as the camera spins turbulently
around her, and our consciousness is denied directedness yet again—denied orientation.
Thus, disorientation becomes a kind of meaning in and of itself, as a way of being
in the gallery, with the work, and perhaps in the world. Much of Neshat’s work is
displayed predominantly in Western contexts where spectators have a limited relationship
to the rich cultural context out of which the work is produced. At the same time, this
disorientation also shifts our relationship to the meaning of the aural/visual information
being presented in the space of the contemporary art museum (or classroom). It is hard to
say how this might play out in the context of present-day Iran. Or how it might play out
in an actual gallery space, rather than a gallery space turned classroom, where people
might be inclined to turn away from the very image experiences that make them
uncomfortable—as I suggest in the analysis of Piper’s work. The broader implications
70
and effects of Turbulent’s disorientation may be located at the level of the musical
metaphor itself, which reveals the complexity of cultural power and gender roles
contained in the framework of both ancient Persian music and poetry and the present
moment in Iran. This musical metaphor has everything to do with speech, who is allowed
to speak, and in what contexts. Deyhim’s character speaks out of turn in this specific
context—a context where women are forbidden to speak or perform the words that her
male counterpart speaks and performs. Thus, Neshat creates a visual space for Deyhim’s
own sonic articulations; it is a space and a metaphor of creative resistance. Neshat has
often described her work as troubling these neat oppositions, such as woman and man.
The visual contrast she sets up in the format of opposing panels sets viewers up within
commonly orientating tropes (dark vs. light, male vs. female, black vs. white) before
facilitating disorientation through the spectator’s own bodily turns, and the physical
turning of the camera around Deyhim’s already tempestuous performance.
Furthermore, Deyhim’s out of turn body, spinning on stage and on screen, takes
up its own cultural space, creating disorientation for Aziri’s character on the other screen.
He hears the sounds and pauses, making a physical turn of his own to face the screen she
inhabits—the space she is taking up in the gallery. And while it may be lost on my senior
seminar full of white undergraduates and myself, Deyhim’s radical presence (beyond the
dramatic sounds and gestures she is making) is not lost on my close friend, or on her male
spectators who are waiting and listening on the opposite screen. Iranian law forbids her
presence; her trespass into the dark and empty auditorium is one with dire consequences,
yet, “when bodies take up spaces they were not intended to inhabit, something other than
71
the reproduction of the facts of the matter happens.”
51
In the case of Deyhim and Neshat,
that disorderly something other is the possibility for [re]orientation. That is, by refusing
coherence and linearity, Neshat refuses directed consciousness, and perhaps a kind of
limiting socio-cultural orientation.
A phenomenological reading is activated when our consciousness is directed
toward particular objects, or when our attention is focused on structures of perception.
When we are turning, we lose focus, or it becomes easy to lose sight of the objects to
which we have directed consciousness. In the case of Neshat’s Turbulent, the turning
aesthetic produced by the spinning camera around Deyhim’s pulsating body suggests a
politics of refusal, a refusal of focus, of spectator orientation—that is, a politics of
turning.
I conceive the concept of a turning aesthetic in order to account for an artistic
strategy and sensibility that structures spectator orientation to a given artistic
subject/object. When fully developed, a turning aesthetic locates and pins down a set of
principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or a particular artistic
praxis. Specifically, given the intellectual pairing of art and phenomenology in a
dissertation about direct address art that “speaks out of turn,” a politics of turning is an
important intervention to make. In this context and my particular intellectual location, I
understand a politics of turning as sharing many concerns and connections with
discourses of blackness and its politics. Blackness has functioned largely in this
contemporary moment as a political location, or containing/maintaining certain political
grounds. In this phenomenologically invested chapter, blackness might be said to produce
(manage), enable, and/or foreclose its own kind of orientation or disorientation. Again, to

51
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 62.
72
invoke Fleetwood, I understand turning as rubbing up against its always already
abhorrent function or presence, in similar ways as “seeing blackness is always a problem
in a visual field that structures the troubling presences of blackness.”
52
This troubling
presence is the basis for both blackness and turning’s political force, but also works as an
orienting device when it comes to developing aesthetics of both. Blackness has
previously had this rigorous (and at times, not so rigorous) treatment. A task, perhaps for
another research project, is to locate and link up (historicize) an aesthetic of turning with
the moment of “aesthetic” conception as a way to understand how an historical politics of
aesthetics might be visually enacted through literal (and perhaps figurative) turning.
Artist Carrie Mae Weems answers the call for [re]orientation by [re]turning both
her spectators and collaborators toward history. She does this by creating new grounds
for both their bodies and history to gather around/through her work. If Piper’s work can
be understood as highlighting the turns spectators make away from the subject of race
and racism, which produces certain physical and psychological effects, and Neshat’s as
compelling spectators’ physical turning, which in turn creates disorientation, then I
understand Weems’ work to be facilitating critical historical turning in order to construct
new ground, a ground on which to be [re]oriented.
53

52
Nicole Fleetwood. Troubling Vision, 3.
53
The history of beauty has its own, historic lineage, one that weaves itself through Plato’s
Plaedrus (370 BC) and Symposium (370 BC), shape-shifting in his 380 BC Republic. By
Aristotle, beauty is able to maintain its meaning in mimesis, which locates and understands
distinct pleasure and value in artistic representation and reproductions of the natural world. From
Aristotle, Kant gives us beauty as “morally good,” and a “symbol” for divine order. Crowell helps
to illuminate the revolutionary insight contained in Kant’s reflections on the “beauty of art,
namely, that beauty alone is an insufficient standard foe valuating the success of an artwork.”
53

Thus, art must also possess an “animating principle of the mind” (“spirit”). With this, Kant
identifies, and what Crowell following Arthur Danto, calls the “metaphorical” structure of artistic
representation. This is all to say, that the “metaphorical” structure of artistic representation
provides a key insight (and historicization) for understanding turning as an aesthetic structure—
73
A Critical [Re]Turn to History
In the winter of 2008, artist Carrie Mae Weems taught an imaginative special
topics course at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where she spent her
year in residency as a Distinguished Visiting Faculty member. From this class came the
collaborative body of work Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, which
used members of the Atlanta community, such as the National Black Arts Festival and
SCAD students, to stage the reenactments of central moments in the quest for global civil
and human rights. Each scene included in the photo exhibition and the short film
represents extensive archival research done by the students and is based on iconic images
and television footage. Some of the events included are the assassinations of John F.
Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and more recently, Benazir Bhutto of
Pakistan in December of 2007. Weems and her students capture other moments of
violence and oppression in their reenactments of the death of Medgar Evers, the killing of
students at Kent State, the capture of Angela Davis, and a constant stream of images that
require witnessing and spark mourning. Collaborators designed and constructed
costumes, props, and sets as well as coordinated the project’s production and performed
in the staged vignettes. Remaining closely tied to her dynamic photographic process

something that is related to aesthetics’ historical drive towards beauty and the sublime—but as
Danto puts it, art’s metaphorical structures (and I argue, an aesthetic of turning) insures that:
No paraphrase or summary of an artwork can engage the participating mind in all the
ways it can; and no critical account of the work can substitute for the work in as much as
a description of a metaphor simply does not have the power of the metaphor it describes.
(1981:172-72)
Just as Kant saw that art makes a claim on us that is independent of the claim of beauty, I argue
that turning (an aesthetic of turning) in Carrie Mae Weems’ Constructing History makes a claim
on us that is independent of our disembodied claim on (or refusal of) history. That is to say, that
Constructing History’s [re]turn to history, discussed in the following section, makes claims on
our collective future and does so through an aesthetic of turning. In what follows, I address the
question: how does this aesthetics of turning get deployed or enacted?
74
throughout the SCAD commission, Weems asserts that “[t]hrough the act of
performance…we are allowed to experience and to connect the historical past to the
present—to the now, to the moment. By inhabiting the moment, we live the experience;
we stand in the shoes of others and come to know first-hand what is often only imagined,
lost, forgotten.”
54

The accompanying video, in many ways, was a result of this robust collaboration.
In it, Weems bridges these events of the past with the present through poetic narration,
going so far as to posit that these moments collectively produced the stage of possibility
for the competition between a black man (Barak Obama) and a white woman (Hillary
Clinton) for the Democratic presidential nomination, which was taking place during the
series' creation. For Weems, history has gathered and been made in “the ashes and [on]
the spirit of all that has come before.”
55
She highlights this by exploiting the constructed
nature of the historical grounds on which the struggle for civil and human rights has been
built. Specifically, Weems seems concerned with the mediated nature of television and
mass media, especially as these hypervisual sites shape our collective perception and
collective memory. This concern is formally underscored through the inclusion of visual
and technological “seams”—for example, the artist intentionally highlights the theatrical
nature of history through her use of the pedestal, which acts as the central site for
reenactment (FIG. 5). The pedestal is one visual seam that lays bare the staged nature of
historical representation (of all kinds). Also, Weems manipulates visible lighting tracks,
cameras and, in some scenes, the backstage and behind-the-camera movements of her
own body as an actor in history’s unfolding in the present. These seams direct our

54
“ACP Now! » Carrie Mae Weems @ SCAD.” ACP Now!. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 May 2015.
55
Kathryn E. Delmez, ed. Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
(Guggenheim Museum, New York: Exhibition Catalogues, 2012).
75
attention to the ways history is not only guided and directed, but also transmitted through
these technologies of vision and production.
Constructing History moves away from facilitating physical or bodily turns to
stage a critical historical turn. First, producing such a body of work requires a radical
reorientation at the level of the student collaborators. Upon discovering the inadequate
historical grounds upon which her students understood history, Weems used the artistic
and performance genre of reenactment in order to produce new ground. Here,
reenactment refers to the act and/or practice of theatrically performing a new version of
an older event (historical event). The new ground produced by this creative process of
reenactment opens up possibilities for radical historical reorientation.
Finally, what gets visually produced through the students’ critical historical
turn—the video installation—also produces a closely related turn, one that confronts
spectators in the context of the contemporary art exhibit. This second turn is also an
historical one, one that I faced when I experienced Constructing History in the summer of
2014 as part of Weems’ Retrospective at the Guggenheim. This critical historical turn on
the part of the museum spectator is achieved through what I term a visual politics of
turning, or turning aesthetic, which is developed in order to discuss a unique set of
possibilities in artworks that mobilize theoretically and/or physically the act of turning.
The incorporation of turning is a distinctive strategy—one imbued with urgent social,
cultural, and political meaning—and a concept that coalesce a set of visual principles for
the task of performing phenomenological close readings of art objects. Here,
phenomenology’s unique historical relationship to aesthetics is important to consider in
order to locate new possibilities for phenomenological turning, and its political import in
76
contemporary art. Indeed, this is evident in Neshat’s work as a political refusal of
orientation—a refusal or construction of different grounds (historical grounds in the case
of Weems). At the same time, history gathers around museum spectators despite there
often being no specific historic ground—designated, constructed or otherwise—to stand
on. This is especially the case in contemporary art museums, where art and its display
often have an antithetical, or at the very least, an amnesiac relationship to history. Despite
this, the spectator does not exist in a vacuum, and thus cannot exist outside of history,
even when standing in a contemporary art museum. However, Weems, through a critical
historical turn aided and abetted through reenactment, provides new ground. This chapter
ends by speculating whether or not this critical historical turn and the new ground it
produces might also produce an occasion for new orientative possibilities between history
and contemporary art spectators.
Both the critical historical turn and its use of a turning aesthetic
phenomenologically [re]orient the museum spectator, but to different degrees and toward
different ends. The critical historical turn catalyzed by Constructing History, similarly to
that of Piper’s Cornered, “speaks” through its method of presenting its meaning. This
art/speech/act manages to bring forth the normally occluded horizons of the past, which
are made familiar through the very mechanisms Weems seeks to deconstruct—vision, the
camera, and linear historiographies. Thus, the critical historical turn is made possible
because the work’s philosophical insight is attained best through an experience of the
work itself, as a process of relearning through the consecutive reenactments in the context
of the video installations at the site of the museum.
77
Wayne Martin demonstrates the imperative in the process of “relearning,” and
how carefully it must be done. In this contemporary moment, our ways of talking about
and coming to know ourselves, others, and our collective and varied histories have
become disembodied ways of knowing.
56
This disembodied relationship to history
produces effects, just as a turn away from race and racism produces a Repetitive Strain
Injury (RSI) in the body; however, because history (and the knowledge of history) is
disembodied, Weems is tasked with putting it back in the body. Reenactment does this
work and, I argue, so too does video installation. As spectators, we learn to [re]turn to
history, to participate in embodied ways coming to understand ourselves and others
through this precarious homecoming. This is risky business because as spectators we are
always experiencing our embodied [re]turn to history through the visual object. This
becomes further complicated, and is discussed in further depth with my encounter with
Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, when the object itself is the body of the artist (or alien
other as in Chapter 3). Weems’ work highlights how both the self and history are
objectified totalities that can be represented and rationally grasped anew in our
phenomenological studies of them. These embodied studies occur both at the level of the
collaborators, and again in the embodied presences of the museum spectator. Thus,
phenomenology’s role “is to help us do this careful, hard work of rethinking the most
basic terms [such as history] in which we explore what it is and means to be humans as
we are in our bodies.”
57

Phenomenology is most salient in this endeavor as it opens up space to examine
how meaning found in our experience (of say, art objects) is generated in historical

56
Joseph D. Parry and Mark Wrathall, “Introduction,” 6.
57
Ibid.
78
processes of our collective experiences over time.
58
Weems exploits this opening through
the classroom as a critical site for our collective experiences. By constructing history in a
way that facilitates critical historical turning, phenomenology (even when it is not
identified as such) also allows students to access interpretive structures of their
reenactment experiences, specifically, how they understand and engage (and perhaps how
we as spectators understand and engage) things around us—particularly art, history and
the construction of both. Judith Butler’s reading of Merleau-Ponty is instructive in this
regard (quoted at length):
Merleau-Ponty maintains not only that the body is an historical idea by a set of
possibilities to be continually realized. In claiming that the body is an historical
idea, Merleau-Ponty means that it gains its meaning through a concrete and
historically mediated expression in the world. That the body is a set of
possibilities signifies (a) that its appearance in the world, for perception, is not
predetermined by some manner of interior essence, and (b) that its concrete
expression in the world must be understood as the taking up and rendering
specific of a set of historical possibilities. Hence, there is an agency which is
understood as the process of rendering such possibilities determinate. These
possibilities are necessarily constrained by available historical conventions. The
body is not a self-identical or merely factic materiality; it is a materiality that
bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally
dramatic.
59

Finally, phenomenology is uniquely well-suited not just for thinking through the radical
possibilities of turning, but more to the point of the dissertation, the ways being out of
turn—taking up space—creates disruption, makes intervention, and shapes as well as
manages orientation. The genesis of meaning of these things happens at the level of
experiencing those out of turn objects and enactments themselves. That is, meaning

58
It is worth mentioning the critically important work of Henri Bergson here, whose influential
phenomonologically inflected philosophy explores how memory and durational experience work.
For more theorizing on perception and memory see: Matter and Memory (Bergson 1896).
59
Judith Butler “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988).
79
making occurs both through the reenactment, the bodily engagement with historical
events, and through the bodily engagements with the final video art text.
Due to Constructing History’s stationary function and smaller scale, bodily turns
are not as central to Weems’ strategic repertoire, nor entirely possible or conducive given
the narrow hallway space in the Guggenheim, where the work was hung. During my
observation period, if people were to stop at all, they did so only for a few moments. In
fact, twice, I guiltily directed my focus and attention toward the piece for the entire 24-
minute running time. Both times I felt in the way as a steady stream of people passed in
front of and behind me. During those screenings, despite the bustle of the museum, only
three people stopped to look at the television monitor for one minute or two before
continuing on their way. While it does not necessarily rely on bodily turns, the project
offers an aesthetics of turning, or a turning aesthetic as part of its visual repertoire (and
perhaps the same can be said of Neshat’s Turbulent). As defined above, this turning
aesthetic is a diverse set of visual principles, strategies, and ideas that are articulated
through the theorization, process, act, or incorporation of turning in a creative work. In
this instance, the camera does the physical turning, which denies spectators orientation by
producing a dizzying state of disoriented vision within its frame. Even as its guiding
project is to construct historical grounds, its turning aesthetic denies sure footing, thus
denying complete historical orientation in similar ways as Neshat’s Turbulent.
However, this strategy moves away from those deployed in Piper’s Cornered, in
that Piper orients her spectators through the objects in the installation in order to evidence
their predisposition to turn away from (and perhaps react violently to) a conversation
about race and racism. While this is a bodily turn—a physical movement away from the
80
installation itself—the work’s phenomenological experimentation gestures towards
possible psychological effects/damage, or RSI. This disorientation in Neshat and Weems’
works, instead, uses an aesthetics of turning, rather than rely on the spectator’s bodily
turns alone. While denying a kind of directedness, this aesthetics of turning opens up
possibilities for [re]orientation (and for Weems, new historical grounds).
So what does one perceive in this setting? What can one learn or experience about
history in a contemporary art gallery? How does one turn, become orientated, or perhaps,
(re)orientated in a context as dizzying as a crowded back hallway at the Guggenheim? In
what follows I make little attempt to address these questions conclusively but instead
pose more questions involving the critical historical turn, with the hope of complicating
a few of assumptions of art and history (as Weems does), and provide another reading of
phenomenology’s possibility and its limitations for analyzing visual art works.

Critical Historical Turns
Constructing History opens with a single black screen and the voice of Weems in
a steady and poetic monologue, “They are protesting everything that ever was…” After 4
minutes and 27 seconds of darkness and the artist’s voice alone, the title, Constructing
History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, emerges on the screen, followed by extreme
black and white television close-ups of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and the
sounds of low windpipes. In this dramatic juxtaposition, the video begins and ends with
both Clinton and Obama. These close-ups fade, as the title did, and a dark room takes
their place. The artist can be seen wandering in the darkness of what is presumably a
classroom—globes, a telescope, desks, and a chalkboard barely visible. Weems’s voice
81
continues:
This is about a story within a story. How to enter this history; what to show; what
to say; what to feel. It was a creation myth—how things came to be as they are. In
this constructed place, our classroom, we revisit the past. The students examine
the facts and will participate in the construction of history.
60

“Narrative and storytelling is in the blood,” declares Weems.
61
Described as coming from
“this big, wonderful, crazy family,” Weems locates and necessitates her desires to tell
stories as a way to “tease out” the relationship between herself and her family. This
relationship at its core is a relationship to a rich family history. These relationships to
family, and to history, are important for Weems as a way to understand her “own being,”
and “her own voice.”
62

Critical turns have been described in many contexts as “turning points,”
“junctures,” “critical points,” or “culminations,” events that represent a decisive change
in direction, or perhaps, orientation. Weems facilitates a critical historical turn as part of
her staged classroom, which was constructed to do precisely the work of creating new
ground for students to gather around history, and a ground for history to gather. The
ground on which history gathers is both visualized and vocalized throughout
Constructing History—that is, history gathers around protest, war, assassinations, and an
ever constant production, flow, and dissemination of visual evidence.
I was daydreaming about the Birmingham Riots in the 1960s and the image
started moving. I was thinking about one particular photograph made by Charles
Moore, and Charles Moore didn’t want me to use his photograph, so I thought,
“Okay, I’m going to bring that photograph to life. I’m going to construct that
moment.”
63

In 2008, when Weems began constructing this moment through images come-to-life, she

60
Constructing History (voiceover)
61
Art21 Segment: Carrie Mae Weems in “Compassion” Snapshot
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
82
and the students focused their energies ands actions on the historical moment of 1968,
narrating those events from a distance of 40 years. Weems makes a critical [re]turn to this
moment in order to examine how we arrive at Barack Obama, an African American,
running for president of the United States in 2008. This is a moment Weems argues is
impossible without the assassinations and deaths of all of those people 40 years ago. “The
trauma, the mourning and the sadness” of the last 40 years produces not only a figure like
Obama, but also the occasion for his election to the highest public office in this country.
For Weems, Obama embodies the desire for and rhetoric of hope, while standing on the
“ashes and the spirits” of those who were taken too soon—those who dared to envision,
dared to dream, confronted death, and were destroyed in the struggle for such a moment
as this. The critical historical turn makes these connections manifest in the process of
constructing, or rather, [re]constructing these moments 40 years later.
Weems describes this project as integral to her responsibility, as an artist, and
human being, to consider how we arrived at this moment in 2008. Through this deep
meditation on and reconstruction of iconic historical events, the artist asks students to
assume the roles for themselves, which is important for her process of making,
constructing, and reconstructing history. Moreover, this creative praxis-based production
opens up new possibilities for orientation. Specifically, both the artist and her
collaborators become differently orientated once historical knowledge is introduced to
their bodies, and then reenacted through those same bodies. For instance, Weems and her
students cast individuals against roles of race, class, and gender orientations. Cross-racial
performance, as well as performances across gender and class distinctions produces
reenactments that not only reorient performers, but perhaps spectators as well. As
83
discussed earlier, bodies take shape based on their actions and the spaces in which these
actions take place. In this way, by creating historical grounds for her students to access
history and “come into understanding,” these grounds also provide occasions for students
to take responsibility for (orient), claim in the body (take shape), and in a way, enact
history as a means of claiming a kind of historical inheritance (critical historical turn).
Weems discusses the confidences one feels (or must feel) when performing history, when
displaying one’s body for the purpose of storytelling. It is about “connecting with a story
that is larger than you,” Weems says to her students. “It’s not about you; it’s not about
you. We are using these bodies to talk about something much bigger than we are. So, find
confidence in the historical story—that we are going to use your body to express this
story through.” Students described this process as an emotion-filled one—an eerie
progression and performance.
64

Furthermore, the idea of constructing history provides the artists with yet another
way to create visual works, as the students not only perform intensive archival research,
but also study the constructed and artificial way in which history is transmitted—told and
retold. In order for collaborators to revisit and reenact the past, they make critical
[re]turns to the history of the 1960s and 1970s. They do so in a way that reveals the
mechanisms that make this history’s production and transmission possible; that is, they
make its seams visible. Their participation is in the construction and the conveying of
history—their critical historical turn—opens up possibilities, and from this newly
grounded place, they create other grounds for history’s critical reception, and that is in
the contemporary art gallery. When exhibited, the need for the artist to tell stories, and
the process by which these stories are visually told, also radically [re]turns and perhaps

64
Ibid.
84
reorients art connoisseurs to a contemporary art that is not historically amnesiac. Through
a politics and aesthetic of turning, spectators can [re]turn to the past and reimagine or
reorient themselves in ways that re-embody themselves within its legacies. Or as Weems
describes her critical praxis, “…with their own bodies, they engage their own dark dream,
their own winter…”
65

What this critical historical return also reveals is that “[i]n one moment, there was
an enormous shift in the American imagination. In one moment, people who had never
considered—African Americans—who had never considered this to be home, this to be a
place that represented them, suddenly said, ‘my country, and my president.’ And ‘my,
my, my, ours.’”
66
Thus, a return to this historical moment 40 years prior allows SCAD
students (and museum spectators) contextual grounds for the delayed sentiment “My
country, my country, my country.” Constructing history as an artistic praxis involving
critical turns can also illuminate individuals claiming this nation as something they can
be part of, or seeing themselves being represented as a part of something, for the first
time.
The grounds on which history gathers, for Weems, is the classroom. However, the
critical historical turning initiated by her work, also takes place at the site of exhibition—
the contemporary art gallery. The completed phenomenological product of Weems and
her students’ critical turns exists in the video archive (if you will), the installed
culmination of their reenactments. This video archive is also the result of a visual
collaboration—an artistic and aesthetic production—that translates into art object, into
installation. The critical historical turns that the video’s installation permits for its gallery

65
Ibid.
66
Ibid. Interview
85
spectators, thus, are driven by its intentional aesthetic design.

Conclusion
In Constructing History, history is personified as a black woman wearing a long
white wrap and literally (and perhaps figuratively) turning as fluffy white snow blows
into the frame from the top left hand corner of the screen (FIG.6). The snow, with the raw
unfiltered spot light, casts shadows of both the woman and the white tree that she inhabits
the space with. What kind of space is this—this presumably cold, dark and equally bright
place? The place from which history spins on its axis? Does history spin—repeating itself
in its various seasons? Is this the place from which history is witnessed? What does
turning, or history’s [r]evolution accomplish physically enacted and perhaps
metaphorically personified through the black female body—a body that is also turning on
screen?
Phenomenology and the language of orientation and disorientation is useful when
formally decoding the works of Piper, Neshat, and Weems. Through experimental
ethnographic phenomenological endeavors, this chapter was conceived. The research in-
situ at times resulted in exhausting and uncomfortable encounters with video
installations, installations that performed in partnership to inspire experimental and often
messy interpretations. However, through this investigational process, alternative modes
of reading and theorizing direct address installations have been identified and named.
Through the ever-present analytic and driving impetus for this dissertation—speaking out
of turn—I re-evaluate the work of Piper, Neshat, and Weems in terms of audience
engagement and a critical spectatorship. Thus, “turning” is productive in its ability to
86
reveal how bodies are compelled to encounter the work that is speaking in this way, to
make evident the ways in which bodies move through (and around) each of the artists’
installation works. Through this discussion and the formal decoding of each piece, and
aesthetic of turning is conceived. Moreover, it is the ethnographic encounter that
uncovers the productive ways in which the works themselves compel turns, bodily and
otherwise.
67
The bodily turns the works impel, the physical turns within the works, and
the critical turns they inspire disrupt spectators and disturb the matrices of power
embedded in fine art viewing practices. This is done through each work’s ability to
produce orientation, disorientation, and/or reorientation. If speaking out of turn can be
understood in this context as a critical methodology deployed by those silenced and
rendered invisible, then orientation, disorientation, and/or reorientation is a powerfully
significant response/result.
Before leaving the UCLA Armand Hammer exhibition Take It or Leave It:
Institution, Image, Ideology, I decided to pay Adrian Piper a final visit. The artist
remained where I had left her, seated in her corner—her posture and gaze unchanged.
Alone again in the room, I approached the last row of chairs and rested my hands on one
of their backs. The video was nearing the end of its cycle:
…let’s be clear about one thing: This is not an empty academic exercise.
This is real. And it has everything to do with you.
It’s a genetic and social fact that, according to the entrenched conventions of
racial classification in this country, you are probably black.

67
By ethnographic encounter, I am referring to my interdisciplinary methodological toolset, one
in which ethnographic participant observation was central. This research was conducted over
several years, and a large portion of it was done in situ. I spent hundreds of hours in museums
across the country, mainly in Los Angeles and New York, and spent a considerable amount of
time collecting field notes for each of the pieces represented in the dissertation. Considering each
work in space and real time, and then transcribing my field notes is what led me to many of my
phenomenological readings.
87
So if I choose to identify myself as black whereas you do not, that’s not just a
special, personal fact about me. It’s a fact about us. It’s our problem to solve.
Now, how do you propose we solve it? What are you going to do?
[Fifteen-second pause. Slow fade out to black. White letters appear on black]
WELCOME TO THE STRUGGLE!

Entranced once again by Piper’s tone and cadence, and slightly annoyed because my
existence proved her argumentation correct, or perhaps, as my gaze swept the gallery one
final time, I saw none of those individuals that the work was actually addressing. Perhaps
this reflects a limitation of the work itself—its requirement of a particular audience that is
absent—or perhaps simply the nature of an installation relic nestled into a small corner in
a large art museum at the end of a sunny Southern California weekend. It was strangely
difficult to pry myself away from that moment, but when I finally did, I turned, and
walked away.

88
CHAPTER TWO: Mark My Words

“Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system,
however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.”
― Patricia Hill Collins, On Intellectual Activism

“Finding one’s voice,” “naming oneself,” reclaiming, reconstructing, and “stealing” the
language are therefore essential activities and metaphors for feminist work and feminist
theory. –Wendy K. Kolkata and Frances Bartkowski (44)

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it.”
― My mother, Zarina Shockley-Sparling

Thirty-one crimson-toned photographic prints hung on the gallery of the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) on the occasion of artist Carrie Mae Weems’
retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, which ran
from January 24
th
to May 14
th
in 2014. The assorted blood red and larger than life images
adorned the white and winding walls of the upstairs gallery, and were framed by two
blue-toned prints of the same hauntingly poised African woman. The cool blue prints
were inverted so that the gaze of both iterations of the woman was cast upon the crimson
ones displayed on the walls in between. The woman’s hair, tightly sculpted and bound at
the back of her head in a braided horn, and her dark profile cast a line of light text into
sober relief. The small lettering in the first image was printed across her bare chest:
“FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED,” and in the same position on the final
frame, the inscription: “AND I CRIED.” The small Roman typeface in all capitals was
been sandblasted on the glass panes of each of the 33-framed prints, and cast thin text
shadows over the images. The sandblasted words together formed the basis of Weems’
responsive witnessing to the 1995 J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibit Hidden Witness:
89
African Americans in Early Photography.
1
In a groundbreaking exercise, the J. Paul
Getty Museum commissioned the mid-career artist to creatively respond to the exhibition
Hidden Witness, which included images from the museum’s private collection and the
private holdings of Detroit collector Jackie Napolean Wilson.
Lifted from diverse archives and re-presented by Weems, these images and their
public exhibition in the Los Angeles museum in 1995 represented the museum’s first
artistic commission, and were staged as a critical response to Hidden Witness. Originally
titled, “Carrie Mae Weems Reacts to ‘Hidden Witness,’” The Getty’s commission of
Weems is a significant one, not only as its first artistic commission, but as an invitation
for Weems, a contemporary artist, to be in critical conversation with an exhibition of such
charged historical content. In an explicit way, Weems is asked to “speak back” at this
photographic archive and its exhibition in a post-rebellion Los Angeles.
2
As Jennifer
Doyle, who traces the important historical context and emotional significance of such a
commission notes, “[f]rom Here I Saw is staged as an explicit dialogue with the images
and representational practices of other photographers; it is a conversation with and
between various sets of witnesses.”
3

1
This exhibition featured Jackie Napolean Wilson’s private photographic collection, which
captures a range of historical prints from photography’s invention well into the post-emancipation
imaginings of black life.
2
This references the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion in response to the trial by jury acquittal of four
police offers of the Los Angeles Police Department following the brutal beating of Rodney King.
The beating, which was caught on tape, was indicative of police relations within black Los
Angeles communities. Following the trial riots broke out across the city over a six-day period.
Just three short years after the uprisings, which heightened racial tensions and placed class
disparities into critical relief, the Getty mounts the show Hidden Witness in Malibu, which is a
photography exhibition entirely focused on African Americans in early photography.
3
Jennifer Doyle in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2013), 112.
90
How Weems chose to enter into the conversation through didactic text forms the
basis for the present analysis. That is, with words and images Weems participates in a
poly-visual and poly-vocal dialogue that forces spectators to engage differently with the
images presented in Hidden Witness and their original contexts. This use of text was
controversial. Indeed, art critic David Pagel writing for Frieze, a widely read
contemporary art magazine, leveraged sever criticism at this exact feature. Pagel
lamented: “The main difference between the exhibitions is that ‘Hidden Witness’ gave
viewers something to look at and ‘Carrie Mae Weems Reacts’ downplayed the open-
ended uncontrollability of the visible in favor of the determinism of the word.”
4
For
Pagel, Weems’ response, particularly her use of text, asserts control over the entire
project’s possibilities for meaning making by the spectators. The artist’s out of turn and
overdetermined presence, for Pagel, prevents spectators from imagining their own
relationship to these historical images of black people.
The cause for upset is that a black woman artist dare insert her presence into the
overwhelmingly white and elite space of the Getty museum. However, this time the black
body on display is not what was particularly offensive. Rather, it was the black woman
artist’s speech acts that posed the threat—her talking back to both the archival history and
its contemporary display. It was both the commission and the sandblasted text that so
offended Pagel. And in wielding text and image, Weems shaped (and perhaps limited) the
conversations being had around Hidden Witness, itself housed and displayed in
Brentwood, California, a gleaming (white travertine) beacon on a hill of white cultural
supremacy. This, in fact, was the greatest transgression Weems could have committed—a

4
David Pagel. “Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography. Carrie Mae Weems
Reacts to ‘Hidden Witness,’” Frieze 24 (1995). Online.
91
transgression and a trespass. Pagel goes even so far as to call the commission “racist” and
concluded that this kind of revisionist dialogue puts “forth a monkey-see, monkey-do
argument,” and that “the paired exhibits suggest that viewers need to be taught how to
properly respond to the 150-year old photographs,” an insult Pagel identifies as “noblesse
oblige at its most arrogant and condescending...”
5

What Pagel fails to acknowledge is a history of failed looking (and seeing),
particularly when engaging with images of black subjugation and suffering. Weems
firmly refuses any denial of history—or responsibility—when spectators are met with the
images from Hidden Witness, many of which are appropriated and included in her visual
response to the exhibition. Weems refuses a kind of cultural tourism and “narrative
dominion,” to use Elizabeth Alexander’s concept that describes the deployment of images
of black bodies, of black experience in the service of someone else’s.
6
Indeed, Weems
disrupts a tendency within these institutional settings to understand looking as
uncomplicated and unaccountable, which is inevitably what makes Pagel so
uncomfortable. There is something about Weems’ words that he and other spectators
cannot escape—once read they cannot be unread.
Perhaps ironically, reading text makes up the large majority of one’s time spent
viewing art.
7
This is the case even before continuing the conversation this chapter
initiates on what might be understood as “text art” or text-based art and its significance.
Overwhelmingly, spectators enter gallery spaces and gravitate first to the wall text

5
Ibid. “Hidden Witness”
6
Elizabeth Alexander. “’Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King
Video(s).” Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Ed.
Thelma Golden. (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1994), 108.
7
This is an argument I make based on over 200 hours spent in museums across the United States
during my fieldwork, which was conducted between the fall of 2011 and the fall of 2015.
92
accompanying each art object. This is the case whether the individual appears to be a
seasoned art expert or a happenstance visitor—each skims the provided plaque
presumably to glean the title of the work, the artist(s), date, medium, and/or in search of
further explanation. What might be unexpected is that this seemingly banal ritual
consumes more of the spectator’s time per artwork than time spent viewing the actual
object on display. In fact, in my own in-situ research, I observed that much of the
practices that make up contemporary art viewing in our current moment are predicated on
the act of reading—and not simply images and objects, but most notably text.
From the moment the museumgoer decides to visit any given contemporary art
institution, she is flooded with literature. Her visit is sandwiched by Internet text that gets
her to the galleries and gives her context, and then brochures, maps, and exhibitions
posters greet her at the door upon entry. Mobile guides, apps, and wall text guide her
through each exhibition. Finally, her viewing experience is concluded and may continue
with the purchase of a catalogue. Hence, reading is central to consuming contemporary
art. This social fact alongside the poignant words of Audre Lorde motivates this chapter
on text and visual speech. In her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language
and Action,” she states: “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had
ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect
you.”
A now hotly debated charge issued by Lorde, the need to break silences has been
reevaluated in feminist, postcolonial, and queer of color theorizing and critique,
particularly as “silence,” and remaining silent can also be read as a mechanism for
survival and freedom. However, there is still something powerful about Lorde’s
93
pronouncement in regard to the written word, one that has been articulated in various
ways throughout history. In another context, Michel Foucault invokes Blanchot in
“Language to Infinity,” to break the silence through the act of writing—“writing so as not
to die,” “or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the
word.”
8
Bearing this need to articulate oneself through the written work, this chapter
examines the role of text within visual artworks through a reconceptualization of French
theorist Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation and critical engagement with Russian
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s “double-voice.” This chapter locates the use of text within
visual art as a distinctive direct address mechanism that issues a call for spectators
through the process of reading. In this chapter, I draw upon Weems, Lorraine O’Grady,
and Adrian Piper, all of whom utilize text as a strategic device within their direct address
artworks. Specifically, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems 1995-
1996); Cutting Out the New York Times (O’Grady 1977); and Vanilla Nightmares (Piper
1986).

“From Here”/ “I Cried”: Interpellation and the Position of the Spectator
If the art discussed in the previous chapter (Chapter 1) can be understood as
advancing the conception of orientation, especially through the act and strategy of turning
the spectator, then this chapter can be understood as examining art that interpellates, or
calls upon its audiences through the act of reading. Although interpellation in Althusser
is the spoken, not written form. Said another way, the three works discussed in this
chapter each theorize the role of language—specifically, the role of text—in their

8
Michel Foucault. “Language to Infinity,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1977), 54.
94
practices of speaking. It is not coincidental that interpellation is also a kind of orientating
process. As discussed in the previous chapter, individuals enter into an activity of being
and/or becoming oriented once confronted with contemporary video installation art. This
orientation and/or disorientation with regard to Althusserian interpellation is thus
facilitated according to the functions of the ideological structures embedded within the
institution of contemporary art itself, as well as the individual works of art. As evidenced
in the previous chapter, this process is catalyzed by and motivates further physical,
historical, and psychological turning, which may also be argued of the pieces discussed in
this chapter. However, rather than a continued focus on the useful merits of
phenomenological theorizing for visual art of this nature, this chapter examines the
degree to which works that heavily rely on text subvert ideological structures through
processes similar to Althusser’s interpellation. Moreover, I argue that the art itself
disrupts dominant ideological logics by implicating spectators through language as
aesthetic form, which is embedded in the direct address art analyzed.
Interpellation is a term coined by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to
describe the process by which ideology addresses individuals in specific sociocultural
locations.
9
Althusser’s famous illustration of interpellation’s function is demonstrated
when a policeman shouts, “Hey, you there!” and at least one individual turns around.
Althusser argues that the one who turns is most likely the one to which the call was
intended. At this moment one realizes that the call is for oneself. Like Althusser, I am
interested in the specific moment when one (a museum spectator) realizes that the call

9
French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser coined the term, interpellation, and describes the
process by which ideology addresses the individual. Althusser’s famous illustration of
interpellation’s function when a policeman shouts “Hey, you there!” and at least one individual
turns around, Althusser argues that the one who turns is most likely the one to which the call was
intended.
95
made by the work of art is for oneself, and thus becomes a particular kind of subject
relative to the ideology of the space one inhabits.
10
Museumgoers are enmeshed in
numerous discursive and social structures that to a varying degree shape their individual
identities. The concept of interpellation provides an interesting framework for thinking
through moments where museumgoers react in perfect sync with, or according to the
ideological cues surrounding each work of art. This is deepened when cues relate to
individual psychology and character identification specific to race and gender.
11

Franz Fanon elaborates on this formulation with an experience of his own. A
young child in a public square cries, “Look, a Negro!” Fanon becomes hailed as a subject
of racism as he realizes he is the only black person present.
12
Both Althusser and Fanon’s
writings suggest that there is limited choice in this matter. Thus, it is the theoretical
notion of being hailed and locked in as a subject that is useful here, specifically with
regard to the act of deciphering/reading a text. In their own unique ways, these bodies of
text-based art reveal how direct address mobilizations of text and literature can shore up
the ideological cues both Althusser and Fanon discuss—so much so that spectators
inevitably become locked in, as Pagel’s discomfort suggests, as spectators cannot help
but read the text that emerges from the artwork and be changed by it.
Through Carrie Mae Weems’ words and the appropriated images from various
troubling contexts, From Here I Saw locks spectators into a specific subject location, and

10
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation,” in La
Pensée, 1970.
11
Peter Brooker. A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory (Student Reference). (Hodder Education
Publishers. 1
st
Edition, 1999).
12
Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. Revised edition. (New York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove
Press, 2008).

96
that is one of the artist herself. Asked to respond to Hidden Witness, Weems starts such a
reaction “FROM HERE.” At the same time that she produces a location, providing shaky
ground on which to view this collection of images, Weems’ work “also takes its viewers
on a tour of the set pieces through which the American viewer comes to know his or her
emotional depths in relation to black feeling.”
13
So what does the viewer see (and perhaps
feel) as part of Weems’ dialogical intervention? After the 1995 exhibition Hidden
Witnesses, From Here I Saw is displayed in multiple contexts on its own. What work
does Weems’ text/image amalgamation do outside of its original witnessing context?
When encountering the piece for the first time, I unknowingly entered from the
back of the gallery where the work was displayed. My own witnessing was a kind of
reverse chronology of Weems’ narrative response. “AND I CRIED” was the first panel I
came to, toned in blue. I remember thinking that the woman in the image looked too cool,
too collected, too in control to be on the brink of tears (FIG.7). So who was crying? I did
not know. Without realizing it at the time, my entire experience of the following 32
images was structured by that question—who cried? Who was the “I” to which that
statement belonged?
As I moved through the crowded gallery, I read the images against the grain of
their narrative structure, I then saw the bright red toned image of men and women from
the civil rights era seemingly waiting for something (or someone); perhaps this collective
waiting was part of a demonstration. In the photograph, the body of the man in the
image’s foreground is broken, for he rests a padded crutch against his shoulder as he sits
on what looks to be the ground. Still, the crowd sits, waiting. The text: “IN YOUR SING

13
Jennifer Doyle. Hold It Against Me, 120.

97
SONG PRAYER YOU ASKED DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL?” I wondered
were they waiting for deliverance? Did they cry? Backwards through time and text I
moved through the images, which shifted from the civil rights era, uplift imagery, to
minstrelsy, Jim Crow, and an image by Robert Mapplethorpe. The seeming disjuncture
caused by the Mapplethorpe image jolted me from reading and caused me to reexamine
the previous images. Even in reverse, the artist’s voice etched on the images carried a
haunting cadence, producing meaning.
AND I CRIED
IN YOUR SING SONG
PRAYER YOU ASKED
DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL?
RESTLESS AFTER
THE LONGEST WINTER
YOU MARCHED &
MARCHED &
MARCHED
YOU BECAME BOOTS,
SPADES & COONS
OTHERS SAID
“ONLY THING A NIGGAH
COULD DO WAS SHINE MY SHOES”
SOME LAUGHED
LONG & HARD & LOUD
ANYTHING
BUT WHAT YOU WERE
HA

The last mantra is etched over the red toned image of Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester
Suit (1980), which is an image of a black man in full suit and vest, his penis hanging from
his unzipped suit pants. The camera’s framing beheads the individual and dismembers his
right hand from his body. Does he cry?
Weems appropriates other images, bathing Robert Frank’s Charleston, South
Carolina (1955) in crimson. This image and others included depict black women among
98
white children and families. Notably, Weems collects several of these images from
Hidden Witness’s archive of studio portraits, and as Sander L. Gilman’s now canonical
text reminds us, there is a deeply entrenched, historical association between
representations of the black body (typically female) and representations of the sexually
illicit.
14
So much so, that black women as oversexed and available objects for recreational
use physically surround and extratextually inform those images in the exhibition of black
women as caregivers. Two frames side by side depict on the one hand a pornographic
image of a nude black woman reclining on a bed of lace,
15
her right hand reaching
towards her genitals as her head and gaze tilt upwards. Her legs are splayed open to the
camera and Weems inserts her text over the woman’s vagina, denying uninhibited access:
“YOU BECOME PLAYMATE TO THE PATRIARCH” (FIG.8). The viewer must read
through the text if they are to gaze upon this woman. On the other hand, the juxtaposed
frame is an image known as Portrait of a Nurse and Young Child (1850), which depicts a
young black woman holding to her cheek a white toddler in a frilly dress, which
highlights another form of labor the black woman’s body provides. Weems’ text
continues this interplay with the words: “AND THEIR DAUGHTER” (FIG.8). Do these
women cry?
Slowly making my way through the galleries at the Guggenheim where the work
was hung in 2014, I was met with more text and still more crimson images.
SOME SAID YOU WERE THE SPITTING IMAGE OF EVIL

14
Sander L. Gilman. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality
in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry (1985), reprinted in
Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 223-261.
15
For a thoughtful analysis of this image, the historical context, and possible connections of the
lace to the laboring bodies of women of color see The Black Female Body: A Photographic
History by Deborah Willis (2002).
99
BORN WITH A VEIL
YOU BECOME ROOT WORKER
JUJU MAMA
VOODOO QUEEN
HOODOO DOCTOR
BLACK AND TANNED
YOUR WHIPPED WIND
OF CHANGE HOWLED LOW
BLOWING ITSELF –HA- SMACK
INTO THE MIDDLE OF
ELLINGTON’S ORCHESTRA
BILLIE HEARD IT TOO &
CRIED STRANGE FRUIT TEARS

The white sandblasted text finds its way on the now infamous scourged back of Gordon,
an enslaved man who escaped to the Union line during the Civil War. He is positioned
for the abolitionist photographer so that the viewer can gaze over the violent extent of his
physical scarring, wounds inflicted by severe beating, lines etched in his flesh each time
the whip made contact with his skin. This image, which was originally mass-produced as
a carte-de-visite, was selected to for its emotional density and its ability to provoke moral
outrage. Weems’ textual intervention calls to testify not only the sonic specters of the
whip as it cut the air and broke across Gordon’s flesh, but also the musical cords of Duke
Ellington and the mournful lyrics of Billie Holliday in her anthemic anti-lynching dirge.
Weems’ text suggests that the melodic cries of Holliday are tears of a strange kind, but
does Gordon cry?
My meandering journey through From Here I Saw ended with four images of four
black bodies, which are undressed before the camera of J.T. Zealy. The daguerreotypist
and South Carolinian was hired by racist pseudo-scientist Louis Agassiz, who
commissioned the images for the purpose of visually illustrating his theory that people of
African descent fit within a different (sub) species. In the past several decades, these
100
images have been salvaged from the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum to be
considered anew in the emerging discourses and histories of African Americans’ complex
relationship to photography. Each sitter, their clothes forced off their bodies and around
the bottom edges of each frame, stares straight ahead, some directly into the camera,
others off into the space of the room in which the images for captured. Their gaze in the
image is focused, glassy eyes piercing through the red toned images, but did they cry?
Coming to the end of the last gallery wall, I was met with the same cool blue
woman, her gaze was now cast towards the right, set upon the four red Zealy
daguerreotypes. I skimmed for the now familiar thin Roman font and read the text,
“FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED.” From here. Where is here? Whose
position is this? Does it emerge from within a particular archive, perhaps the artist’s
location? Or from within the gallery where these images are hung, the position of the
spectator? For myself as a spectator, the first textual encounter “AND I CRIED”
produced the emotive curiosity that propelled my body through the gallery space and
through Weems’ piece. However, it was the “FROM HERE” that situated me, a black
woman, relative to ideology. In fact, it is this designation of space, the here, which also
situates both the original context of the commission (The Getty in Malibu, California
1995), and its current exhibition in the Guggenheim museum (New York 2014).
Jennifer Doyle’s reading of this subject position is also helpful here. Reading for
the work’s emotional currency, Doyle points out the ways in which many of the original
contexts for the photos Weems uses in the series is one of the unmarked viewer, “in
which a naturalized, distanced, and objective point of view organizes the presentation of
racial difference within the visual and narrative field, situating the viewing without
101
requiring, however, that she feel this position.”
16
Weems unmasks this neutral position by
demanding the spectator be anchored in the process of identification; thus, “FROM
HERE I SAW…” provides both the positional context for Weems’ commissioned
witnessing and an ideological marker for the spectator’s experience. Here, in both
instances, is the fine art museum. As Doyle points out, the “unmasking of this ‘neutral’
position as the hallmark of white supremacist ideology” is one of the critical
interventions this text-laden work makes. The viewing subject in both of these museum
contexts is presumed to be, in the artist’s words, “white America [seeing] itself in
relationship to the black subject.”
17
For Doyle:
It is a lesson in the affective density of the historical project, in which bearing
witness might be a critical act, but it might also be a form of complicity,
depending of the spectator’s location. At what point does witnessing switch from
being a point of resistance to being a point of collusion? How does one know the
difference—is it a matter of how we look at something, how we feel about what
we are looking at? What is the relationship between one and the other?
18

Ultimately, in the space of the Guggenheim, it is I, the spectator, who “… SAW.”
Despite looming questions of positionality, the artist’s body is now nowhere to be found
in this series, just her words, and the spectator as the one who sees them, reads them.
Ideology in the Althusserian sense is “the imaginary relation to the real conditions of
existence.”
19
Drawing on the works of Freud, Lacan, and Gramsci in his foundational
essay, Althusser redefines both Marx and Engels’ notion of ideology as false
consciousness.

Ideology is a set of ideas, a normative vision proposed by dominant
societal actors, organizing its members accordingly. Both Althusser and Fanon’s

16
Jennifer Doyle. Hold It Against Me, 116.
17
Interview with the artist produced for Art21.org and available on its website.
18
Jennifer Doyle. Hold It Against Me, 116.
19
Louis Althusser. “Ideology and the State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in La
Pensée (Trans. Ben Brewster in 1970), 151.
102
deployment of interpellation is predicated on dominant ideological structures into which
individuals are interpellated. However, this is not the case for the artist or the work
discussed here, Weems, through ideological cues embedded within the language,
restructures the spectator’s subject position based on her own position as a black woman
visual artist—“FROM HERE,” and “I SAW.” Doyle also points out the ideological
coding embedded in the narrative structure of the panels when read left to right, “I
SAW,” “YOU BECAME,” “I CRIED.”
Rather than an interpellation into dominant ideological subject positions, Weems
summons the viewers into her own subject position. In this way, this series and its
ideological content exists outside of or at the margins of dominant or common sense
logics—it points to the dominant structure of viewing within contemporary art museums
at the same time that the work subverts that structure.
20
Or as Doyle puts it, the mournful
series “asks questions about the relationship of the museum to the historical traumas
archived within it.”
21
Thus, From Here I Saw as an interpellative enactment functions
against the grain of established ideological structures, rupturing the steady current of
signification, and recapturing spectators through alternative ideological processes to do
radically different work. This work functions at the level of feelings as signaled by the
“AND I CRIED.” We, the spectators, are the ones who should be crying, as Weems’
work interpellates us into a collective witnessing of this historical trauma, “FROM
HERE” within the contemporary art museum.

20
Here my thinking around the notion of “common sense,” particularly as it relates to issues of
representation, is heavily influenced by the work of Kara Keeling, in her groundbreaking text The
Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007).
21
Jennifer Doyle. Hold It Against Me, 119.
103
The interpellative work Weems and others perform is closely connected to what
Chela Sandoval terms differential oppositional consciousness, in that differential
resistance functions very much like Althusser’s hoped-for but unachieved 1960s “science
and ideology,” when “the differential form of cognitive mapping is used, it is the citizen-
subject who interpellates, who calls up ideology.”
22
As stated above, this is opposed to, or
moves away from Althusser’s formulation, in which it is “ideology that interpellates the
subject.” For an artist like Weems to deploy differential oppositional consciousness
through her work, she can depend on no (traditional) mode of belief in her own subject
position or ideology; “nevertheless, such positions or beliefs are called up and utilized in
order to constitute whatever forms of subjectivity are necessary to act in and also (now
obviously) constituted social world.”
23

Weems’ response via From Here I Saw is also a study of the ideological locations
from which the images emerge. The artist coordinates the potentially liberatory stance
(“FROM HERE”) in relation to the dominant order as a space of mourning (“AND I
CRIED”). The implication then is aligned with Sandoval’s extension of Althusser’s
theory of ideology in “that the citizen-subject can learn to identify, develop, and control
the means of ideology, that is, marshal the knowledge necessary to ‘break with ideology.’
While at the same time also speaking in, and from with, ideology.”
24
Weems’ thirty-three
color-toned images, framed in glass and sandblasted with didactic text, might be
understood as producing what Sandoval outlines as differential oppositional
consciousness—a strategy of the artist’s particular oppositional ideological positioning.
According to Sandoval, “differential consciousness is the expression of the new subject

22
Chela Sandoval. Methodology of the Oppressed, 31.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 44.
104
position called for by Althusser—it permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands
of dominant ideology.”
25
Finding an intellectual and artistic home among the cohort of
“U.S. third world feminists” Sandoval’s work highlights, Weems continues in their
legacy of witnessing (“FROM HERE”), and the transformative potential in feeling deeply
(“AND I CRIED”). From Here I Saw ruptures the ideological dilemma through the
interpellative function of the text. That is, the position from which the artist enacts her
differential consciousness is the exact location she calls the spectators to. It is a place of
collective mourning—Weems subverts the ideological expectations and cues of the
museum and directs spectators willing to be hailed into guided witnessing mourning in
the very space from which dominant logics are structures and disseminated. A brief but
transformative rupture.

Double-Voice: Cut Paper Poetry
White, black, and read all over—read, and cut, and pasted. Black newspaper print
of various typefaces and size dapple white space, a constellation in space and time.
Individually, these constellations are visual poems by artist Lorraine O’Grady. The year
is 1977. The white space is New York, specifically, the well known and widely read New
York Times Sunday newspaper. Cutting Out The New York Times, in its entirety, is a
series of 26 “found” or “cut out” newsprint poems made by O’Grady on successive
Sundays, from June 5 to November 20, 1977. The serial poetry was not exhibited for the
first time until almost thirty years after its construction. When exhibited, the poems were
hung at the Chelsea Hotel in March 2006 (FIG. 9) at the urging of curator Nick Mauss,

25
Ibid., 44.
105
and since, the series has been exhibited in a number of dizzying contexts. Despite the
wide-ranging and varied exhibition frameworks, the work itself emerged out of a very
specific context.
26

Originally, O’Grady went to the New York Times to find herself, an exploration of
identity and meaning making. The artist’s initial impulse was not to disorient, as the
artworks do in Chapter 1, but rather to make sense of something that disoriented her. “I
was trying to take what I considered an irrational world and make sense of it.”
27
During
this time, O’Grady was enrolled in a class titled, “Futurist, Dada and Surrealist
Literature” at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Cutting Out the New York Times
was completed during a moment of joint physical and psychological trauma—the artist
describes just having had a biopsy on her right breast which proved negative—and the
poems were inadvertently initiated while browsing the Sunday New York Times to make a
“thank you” collage for her doctor. The artist wondered:
“What if, unlike Tzara and Breton’s random newspaper poems, she forced
randomness back to meaning, rescued a personal sensibility from the public
language that had swamped it, might she not get –rather than Plath and Sexton’s
confessional poetry which made the private public—a “counter-confessional”
poetry that could make the public private again?”
28

26
It was after working for five years as a young intelligence officer for the Departments of Labor
and State, first on African and then on Latin American affairs, when language collapsed for the
artist, “melted into a gelatinous pool.” During those years, O’Grady was tasked with reading ten
national and internationals newspapers each day. In the period leading up the Cuban Missile
Crisis, this hefty load included three complete daily transcripts in Spanish of Cuban radio
stations, as well as the endless overnight classified reports from agents in the field. It was in this
moment when O’Grady quit her job as an intelligence analyst and began her roundabout and self-
guided journey into art. (This narrative was found on the artist’s website along with the statement
for the piece.)
27
Lorraine O’Grady, “Both/And” a lecture at MoCA Los Angeles (2015).
28
This quote and the information preceding it has been pulled from the artist statements found in
the Lorraine O’Grady’s online archives.
106
Despite the very personal reasons for creating the poems and the rescue mission O’Grady
embarked on, once the poems were finally exhibited some 30 years later in 2006, the
artist’s work was thrust into the rhetoric of the time and was caught within what O’Grady
describes as the odd phenomenon of being “post-black before I was black.” That is, the
poems were being reclaimed and discussed in a way as having nothing to do with race
(and gender) due to the colorblind era in which they were being displayed. Recounting
the exhibition moment and in a tone of both frustration and gest, she declared that Cutting
Out the New York Times was her “last work as a post-black artist.”
29
In 2006 when the
poems were first exhibited for the public, the seeming lack of identity politics or what
could be recognized as themes of race or gender constitution is what most likely led to
the “post-black” assessment. However, the artist continually describes the poems as being
very personal, and also being directly about her classical education. They are a look
inside Lorraine O’Grady’s head in the late 1970s. So what does this text-scrambled look
inside do when it is later hung on the gallery walls of the contemporary art museum?
In ways similar to Michel Foucault’s musings on “What is an Author?,”
O’Grady’s cut-paper poems produce an occasion for which to examine the relationship
between an author (authors) and a text, particularly “the manner in which a text
apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.
30
In each of O’Grady’s
poems there is a double address. The voice of the text/poem addresses the addressee (the
museum spectator) and also the “object of the utterance” in so far as the object is called
into being both as “judge and witness” and therefore, as its “ally or enemy.” The work of

29
Ibid.
30
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author? (1977), 115.

107
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin suggests poets along with speakers in quotidian
scenarios of everyday life are consistently working within the emotional range and
political position of the listener (or reader).
31
Moreover Bakhtin offers a useful
vocabulary for analyzing both written and verbal speech acts, of which ‘double-voicing’
is particularly valuable for reading Cutting Out the New York Times.
In order to understand what double-voicing is, it is important to first rehearse
what single-voicing refers to. ‘Single-voiced discourse,’ as described by Bakhtin (1984),
is the direct relation between language and the people, objects, and events to which
language refers. Judith Baxter explains that “[a]s this type of direct, unmediated, ‘fully
signifying’ discourse is directed towards its referential object, it constitutes, in Bakhtin’s
view […] the ultimate semantic authority within the limits of a given context.”
32
On the
other hand, a discourse based on the double-voiced “is directed both towards the
referential object of speech as in ordinary discourse, and towards another’s discourse,
towards someone else’s speech.”
33
Bakhtin’s use of “double-voiced” is a theory of
“polyphony.” This theory amplifies the potential for speaking out of turn; at the same
time it is complicating it. In the case of Cutting Out the New York Times, O’Grady wields
her own voice against and through the cut paper words and phrases appropriated from the
New York Times itself. It is an act of out of turn poetics against the textual grain of the
news publication as well as an unwieldy collaboration, one that invites the hegemonic
structure to take up space even as it is deconstructed.

31
Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 1st edition. (Minneapolis: Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 194.
32
Ibid., 189.
33
Morris, Pam, ed. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. 1
edition. (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1995), 105.
108
Bakhtin’s conception of polyphony is particularly useful when analyzing
O’Grady’s and other text based works that are appropriate images and texts from
originary sources. Borrowed from music discourse, polyphony literally translates as
multiple voices. In line with these definitions, O’Grady’s New York Times poetry
contains many voices, while at the same they are being held together by one artist voice.
Baxter identifies the practice of polyphony through double-voicing “as both a unique
linguistic construct and a valuable interpretative tool for scholars and practitioners to
comprehend the way in which speakers routinely engage with each other…”
34
As an
interpretative tool for O’Grady’s work, polyphony opens up the ways in which each cut
paper word or phrase is representative of its own perspective, its own cogency, and its
own narrative and aesthetic weight within the poem. The artist does not place her own
voice uniformly between the narrative structure of the poems and the spectator. Rather,
through a kind of polyphony, O’Grady allows individual chunks of text, in their varied
typeface, colors, and sizes, to capture and subvert the viewers in the process of
reading/viewing each poem.
Indeed, these poems are constituted through multiple authorial voices, rather than
O’Grady’s alone. O’Grady dissects disparate textual voices and then crafts them together
in a way that produces, as the artist describes, a new order and a new logic. At the same
time, O’Grady’s use of double-voice reveals “the ways in which power relations are
constructed between speakers according to the interplay of social categories such as

34
Judith Baxter. “Bakhtin’s Theories of Double-Voiced Discourse.” Double-Voicing at Work.
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. CrossRef. Web. 30 Apr. 2016), 3.

109
gender, age, ethnicity, profession and status.”
35
That is, as O’Grady mines the New York
Times in search of herself (a black middle-class woman), she is confronted with a power
structure (mainstream newsprint culture) that renders her body and experiences invisible.
O’Grady forces a kind of poetic rationality out of this “irrational text” based on her
deeply personal experiences; the piece demonstrates both the “interplay of social
categories” and a subversion of those categories through double-voicing.
Take for example, “The Renaissance Man Is Back In Business [sic]” (September
25, 1977) (FIG. 10). Instead of a single uniform and cohesive text held together by the
artist’s totalizing voice, this poem curates a plurality of consciousnesses—multiple chains
of original thought—that are then cut and strung together.
When Films ‘Quote’ Other Films
—The Moral Is Implicit
Silence Is Silver
White and Black and
THE SOUND THAT SHOOK HOLLYWOOD
The Crisis Deepens in
Theatrical Détente
36

Each element presumably represents its own New York Times title, tagline, article, or
advertising—its own world. The spectator is confronted by both the single cut paper
poem presented by O’Grady and a word collage that holds distinct each original text’s
individual reality. The poems individually and as a body of work appear as dialogic
interactions of distinct ideologies and/or perspectives, emerging from the possibilities
allotted in the original publications. In some compositions the cut paper fragments still

35
Ibid., 2.
36
Lorraine O’Grady, “The Renaissance Man is Back in Business” (Parts 2-3) in Cutting Out The
New York Times (1977).
110
speak for themselves—even against the artist—revealing their original locations, as their
contexts speak directly through the poem.
This can be observed in the poem “Missing Persons” (October 23, 1977). In the
fourth panel a chunk of text three lines long and overwhelming in size nearly fills the
white space of the page. Indeed the corners of the cutout section reach deep into the
corners of the white sheet to which it has been adhered only a few centimeters from the
edges. The text claims so much space that the reader almost misses another much smaller
cutout piece directly above it—the only other words to share the panel. The smaller text
reads: “get your gloves on” in rounded lettering and bolded font. Directly below, the
large excerpt seems to shout from the white panel and certainly from the poem as a
whole:
Make up for all the weekends
you can’t remember
with one you’ll never forget.

The text is also bold, and despite the balance that O’Grady maintains throughout the
series, “Missing Persons” (FIG. 11-12), and this text panel in particular pull the reader
away from the cadence of the artist’s double-voiced poetry to claim visual and perhaps
vocal space for itself. Nearer the left hand side of the piece, which is to be read left to
right, these nonsensical words are printed in black on manila newsprint; they are offset by
heavy dark black text at the far right and one thin line of white text set on a jet-black
background. Despite the darker letters to the far right, the reader’s eyes are repeatedly
drawn back to the left—to the overpowering words “Make up for all the weekends…” In
this context, these words start to mean on their own, apart from what O’Grady is trying to
do with them in the poem. They produce a feedback loop that will never satisfy as the
111
reader will never know how to “make up for” the time the presumed advertising makes
mention of. The artist’s poem leaves no instructions; rather it carries on in its collage-like
fashion of suturing desperate voices together in order to articulate the artist herself across
the white panels—to create rationality where she has found none. In this moment upon
reading these seemingly arbitrary words, the process of this reading is ruptured, stalled in
the visual and sonic overbearance of a text that makes promises—promises the poem
itself cannot keep.
Through pieces like “Missing Persons,” one can begin to see that both the role of
O’Grady and the position of the reader are fundamentally reoriented at the site of the
poem’s exhibition, as neither party in the chain of signification can monopolize the
poem’s “power to mean.” O’Grady attempts to marshal the text as a language of the
dominant culture to speak her own position, a minority position—but the text in this
poem resists. In reading O’Grady’s text alongside Bakhtin’s dialogism, there is a
recognizable multiplicity of remnant perspectives (and voices) embedded in Cutting Out
the New York Times. And as demonstrated, those fragmented perspectives both alter and
inform readings of the work in its entirety. This, again, is analogous to Bakhtin’s theory
of “multi-voice” or “double-voiced.” The principle itself serves as a referent of Cutting
Out the New York Times’ aesthetic field: that is, the newspaper publication, the literary
tradition of poetry, the medium of collage, and the space of the contemporary art gallery.
Within this field, each cut paper word or phrase is its own entity—delineated by gaps (the
white space of the canvas), as well as hard lines and angles orchestrated by the artist.
However, each piece does relate to and is constructed/authored by O’Grady, and as part
of its construction, interacts with those other bits and fragments around it.
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The aesthetic arc of the piece does not logically unfold, but rather interacts to
produce meaning for the reader. Each time it is read/viewed, the dialogic Cutting Out the
New York Times constantly engages with and is informed by other works (namely the
New York Times Sunday newspaper) and voices (those authors and advertisements).
O’Grady draws on the history of the past use of the New York Times and meanings
associated with each word, phrase, or cluster cut out included. Whether conscious or not,
all text is organized and constructed in response to and/or in relationship with other
possible statements in the newspaper, and in anticipation of future ones. I argue that
while O’Grady deploys polyphony through her New York Times cut poetry as a strategy
of speaking out of turn; however, “Missing Persons” reveals the limitations as polyphony
works against O’Grady’s artistic voice and the dominant language resurfaces even when
its being appropriated and redirected. This also relates to the opening discussions of this
chapter of how I understand text as interpellating or locking in its subjects. That is, the
subjects are multiply interpellated as the voice of the text is multiply constituted—this is
the point of both my reading of O’Grady’s work and my analysis of the limitations in its
central strategy.
The cut paper poetry, its grammatical ordering, and collective statements, which
are separated from any utterances or speech acts are, “technical signs,” according to
Bakhtin, which advance potential signification. The artist’s voice is deployed on the side
of articulated language. According to Bakhtin, the intonation or voice not captured in the
“phonetic abstraction” of language, is always produced “on the threshold of the verbal
and the non-verbal, the said and the non-said” and it is through that it addresses itself to
the viewer. Cutting out the New York Times is an address that is affective and ethico-
113
political rather than linguistic. The work “appropriates, travels, avails itself of linguistic
and semiotic elements, confirms and drifts away, critiques and legitimates meanings and
established intonations.”
In viewing the work as individual poems or as a collective “look into the artist’s
head,” readers/viewers are faced with the ways in which these layered voices together
both alter and inform one another to produce new meaning. The series is quite literally
fashioned “out of turn,” and at the same time the poems are dialogical, they also resist
closure or unambiguous expression. This occurs even as they are layered together by
O’Grady to produce new meaning (rationality). Despite the strategic ordering of text,
these works fail to produce “a whole,” as O’Grady’s strategic consciousness is one that
exists out of order and on the fringes of other consciousnesses.

Vanilla Nightmares
A dark black woman lounges over the newspaper print on the left side of the New
York Times issue for June 20
th
, 1986. Sketched in black charcoal, she is nude; with legs
splayed, she is relaxed with arms resting over her bald head in carefree abandon. A
column of type advances up from the bottom of the page, stopping in-between her open
legs. Her open and available figure, in stark contrast, is lolled across articles on the page,
many of which mention the apartheid regime and resulting increase in civil unrest in
South Africa. Her right leg hangs down onto the right side of the newspaper, toes tickling
the face of another charcoal being, whose large oval face houses wide and vacant eyes
devoid of iris and pupils. Above this large empty face are the red all-capital words
“SOLUTION—SOLUTION—THE BLA K SPACE.”
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These words refer back to the opposite page, where the woman is reclined. One
article in particular discusses the official censorship happening in South Africa where
newspapers published large blank spaces where articles or images were to be printed.
These images and writings, of course, were ones that the South African government
found objectionable, and thus, needed to be erased. The blank space in the red lettering
directly following the “A” is suggestive in that it could directly correlate to the article in
reference to the “BLANK SPACE” as a result of censorship, or as the literal shape of the
space in the text suggestions, the viewer might also read “BLACK SPACE.” This “black
space,” as insinuated by the haunting of the “C,” might refer to the figures themselves, a
kind of black space-taking being trespassing in the notably white space of The New York
Times. Described above is Vanilla Nightmare # 2 (FIG. 13), and perhaps the “black
space” that haunts “blank space” is what Vanilla Nightmares (1986) are made of—what
they are all about. As Lucy Lippard describes the spaces and the charcoal beings that
inhabit Adrian Piper’s work, they are “at once haunting and threatening, the stuff of
nightmares for those in power.”
37

Piper’s body of work Vanilla Nightmares (1986), shares an inspirational starting
point with O’Grady’s Cutting Out the New York Times: The New York Times itself. Both
artists stage critiques about the purported objectivity and cultural states of the New York
Times newspaper, and both use appropriated text and images to speak back, or force the
Times to be read differently. However, each artist approached the publication differently.
O’Grady goes to the Times to find herself, finding irrationality instead, decides to
produce rationality through her cut paper poems. Piper, on the other hand, selects the

37
Citation lost.
115
Times as her point of reference, “because,” she states, “that is the newspaper I read,
because it is generally high quality and comprehensive reportage; because of its graphic
sophistication, and because of its commitment to authoritative coverage of “all the news
that’s fit to print.”
38
In Piper’s illuminated manuscripts, she thickly applies charcoal and
red crayon drawings over New York Times advertisements for “the good life,” as well as
articles specifically about race relations in the late 1980s. According to Piper, “the
manuscripts are chosen for their racially loaded content, their graphic imagery, their
subliminal connotations, and the objective declarative voice in which they purport to
speak.”
39
The artist’s drawings are of dark and ghostly figures, often described as
phantoms that haunt the now yellowed newsprint pages. These specters are etched larger
than their white counterparts in the Times’ advertisements, often disproportionate and
constructed with vacant expression and crude facial features. These eerie figures are
“vanilla nightmares”—the “subauthoritarian news that’s not fit to print.”
40

Targeting racist defense mechanisms as Piper’s other object and installation
works do, the artist authors a different kind of news. To quote Piper at length:
That’s the news about deep fears, anxieties, and fantasies about blacks that lurk
beneath the surface of rational concept formation and language in racist
consciousness: about blacks as supernaturally strong or sexually potent; as feral,
lascivious, wanton invaders…The drawings bring these stereotypical nightmares
to the surface of the page and of consciousness, cut them down to size, and depict
them in explicit detail.
41

38
Adrian Piper. Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume I: Select Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 253.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
116
In one of her most discussed “nightmares,” Piper engages with the taboo of interracial
sex (and interracial desire). In Vanilla Nightmare #8 (1986) (FIG.14), Piper appropriates
an ad for Bloomingdale’s perfume “Poison,” applying thick charcoal lines to create the
five demonic figures that frame the ad’s white model. Below the large heading text,
“POISON,” the Bloomingdale’s ad copy reads, “the silent potion exclusively ours for
you.” This sensuous language is matched only by the model’s pose—head titled to the
viewer’s right, eyes delicately shut, she extends her bare arm high into the frame in
sumptuous and unrestrained passion. Piper surrounds this perfume model with five dark,
bald, and presumably male figures, all with elongated incisors, mouths agape and eyes
cavernous and white. One of the black charcoal figures lowers its mouth to the model’s
shoulder in a bite that seems to provide cause for her sensual abandon. The central figure
is perhaps the most striking as it leans its head back in response to the woman’s heady
essence, eyes seeming to roll into the back of the figure’s head so that only uncanny
white cavities remain. The figure seems to softly caress the delicate thin white arm,
which is starkly contrasted by the demonic figure’s thin black fingers. Across its tilted
head reads another signifier of the perfume, the name “POISON.”
The ad’s text punctuates Piper’s charcoal additions like poetry atop the biting
figure’s head:
Haunting of eternity
A thousand and one journeys
Mysterious encounter defying description
Watch for the enchantress
Poison has arrived.

Piper’s dialogical engagement with the text simultaneously presents both the woman as
poison(ous), the ad’s intent, and the black figures as well via the forehead stamp of the
117
central figure and feral desire present in all figures. This text-image amalgamation of
danger, mystery, and fantasy that Piper revives using the Bloomingdale’s ad is not a new
communion. Instead, we are pointed back to her title Vanilla Nightmares, which re-
situates this fear of the black sexual predator as one of white (vanilla) imagining.
However, as others have cautioned in the reading of Piper’s work, her explicit
deployment of this pervasive stereotype might in fact “feed the stereotypical myth” itself.
In Piper’s creative restaging the advertisement’s text through her charcoal figures, the
spectator is perhaps uncertain (if only momentarily) who or what the real demon is.
42

So what role then does text play in Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares? The artist’s
thickly etched red and black text is sparse throughout the series, and yet, the art is most
decidedly a text-based body of work. Piper forces her viewers to read The New York
Times through her ghostly figures, their bodies determining what can and should be read.
The black figures dwell on each manuscript, literally and figuratively illuminating both
the news “fit to publish,” and that which is unfit—the complex racist and racialized fear
of blackness, of “BLACK SPACE,” that the figures suggest undergird “the news” as a
cultural institution. Perhaps it also has something to do with the periodic use of German
idioms,
43
which has the potential to disrupt the process of reading this news entirely and
to a different kind of work altogether.

42
Marjorie Welish, “In This Corner: Adrian Piper’s Agitprop,” Arts Magazine 67, No. 7 (1991),
46.
43
The artist on her use of German throughout the series: “Sometimes I try to enhance the
neutralizing effect of the drawings by adding deflationary text, “What if…?”—“So what?”
Sometimes I use the German rather than the English idiom because the Germ “und wenn nun?”—
“Na, und?” has an aggressive, challenging edge that the English lacks and that better reflects the
stereotypes of blacks as aggressive and powerful. The German could also be translated into
English as “Now what?”—“Oh, yea?” It thus has a broader, more provocative meaning that eggs
one on while it deflates (Piper 1996: 253).
118
Both O’Grady and Piper manage to use the technology of intepellation, through
their appropriation of text from the New York Times to do something other than
interpellate their spectators/readers into the dominant cultural ideological structures that
constitute the publication itself. Their mobilization of this direct address strategy, the use
of text within their artworks, allows them to speak back and out of turn from the
hegemonic and authoritative voice of the New York Times.

Conclusion
This chapter seeks to do many things, one of which is to answer the 1980’s call of
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis for more complex understandings of feminist
artistic expression, understandings and theories that “goes beyond the personal into the
questions of ideology, culture, and the production of meaning.”
44
This chapter centers the
text-laden works of Weems, O’Grady, and Piper in order to make a case for their
interpellative nature. Specifically, I have argued that the act of reading text, as part of
visual art objects, is the one that potentially disrupts spectator experience, both of the
work and of the venues in which the works are staged. Furthermore, I have demonstrated
the impulse of the works towards the practice of reading itself as a direct address
provocation. This provocation is part of the interpellative function via the act of reading;
it is one that, like the ideological apparatus, is incorporated and inextricably link to its
modes of producing and consuming the works of art. It offers spectators an opportunity to
be hailed—to be oriented differently in relation to language and ideology.

44
This charge can be found in “Textual Strategies: the politics of art-making” (1980), in Amelia
Jones’ (ed.) Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Chapter 10), 66.

119

CHAPTER THREE: A Room of One’s Own: White Walls and Alien
Bodies

“For the past several months I’ve been briefing the civilian community on the
subject of female interrogators and their use of sexual innuendo as a critical
weapon in the crucial fight against global terrorism. I do so to make it more
widely known that the war on terror offers American women an unprecedented
opportunity to demonstrate their strength and charm by providing us with an
enemy whom sexuality is a key weak point.” –Sergeant Fusco (2007)

The epigraph for this chapter was preceded with “Good morning and God Bless
America,” and followed by muffled laughter from the audience, as scholar artist Coco
Fusco—posing as Sergeant Fusco—delivered a performative paper for the Museum of
Modern Art’s symposium entitled: The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the
Visual Arts, which took place in New York at the beginning of 2007. Her intervention
was, perhaps, unsurprising for the organizers at MoCA, as the moderator introduced the
artist as Sergeant Fusco and facetiously suggested that she would initiate the conversation
by “disciplining” the audience. However, based on the audience’s reactions, they were
not only surprised, but delighted and at times, embarrassed. Sergeant Fusco presented her
paper alongside a dynamic PowerPoint presentation entitled: Freeing the Feminist
Future, which included satirical text slides and suggestive infographics.
Prior to her MoCA panel performance, Sergeant Fusco had been invited to speak
in other art venues, starting with Performance Space 122 in New York, in which the
project was developed and filmed. Performing a graduate of a military intelligence school
and an experienced interrogator, Fusco briefs her MoCA audience on the rationales for
exploiting female sexuality and sexual insinuation as an interrogative tactic for extracting
120
information from presumed male Islamic fundamentalists. Like many of her
performances, A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America was a
traveling piece between 2006 and 2008. The opening of Fusco’s original lecture
performance differed only slightly in tone from her MoCA presentation, stating:
[A]t the onset of the new millennium, American women finally have what they
need to demonstrate their valor. The War on Terror has provided a great
opportunity to the women of this country...The battle for freedom is being waged
in rooms just like the ones [Virginia] Woolf spoke of. In these sanctorum of
liberty around the world, American women are using their minds and their charms
to conquer our enemies. American women in uniform are leading our nation’s
effort to save the civilized world from the threat of terrorism. I know I am proud
to be one of those women. And today, I am here to tell you how you can be one
too.

Provocatively, the artist went so far as to suggest that in the wake of September 11th, the
“War on Terror” offers an “unprecedented opportunity for women, as the U.S. provides
the space and support women need to prove they are powerful forces in the struggle for
democracy.” This suggestion was made in jest, which was not lost on her MoCA
audience, judging based on their laughter. However, the macho posturing of the business-
like Sergeant Fusco moves beyond an easy critique of U.S. military culpabilities abroad
in the wake of September 11th, to include the artist wielding security discourse—
problematic and violent as it may be—in a mounting parallel attack against the art world
itself.
This chapter traces four pioneering performance artworks by both Fusco and
Lorraine O’Grady, arguing that their direct address deployments of alien bodies and
alienation function to theorize out of turn enactments within the modern and
contemporary art museum. Both O’Grady and Fusco channel their own approaches to
alienation and multi-faceted identity politics into dynamic mixed-media performance
121
pieces and, in doing so, produce alternative ways of understanding and engaging direct
address art and the myriad of social and political ideologies their work both taps into and
works against.
1
O’Grady and Fusco capitalize on mixed-media performance art’s
capacity for unruliness, which in turn articulates heterogeneous ideologies both silenced
and rendered invisible within the art museum. Against the backdrop of the feminist
artistic movements of the 1970s and 80s and the emergence of multicultural discourses
and critiques of the 1990s and early 2000s, these artists summon, as Brooks articulates in
her work on performers of in 1850-1910: “multiple performance strategies, performative
ideologies, and new popular cultural technologies to counter-intuitively articulate and
deploy the discourse of socio-political alienation.”
2

One of the principal scholars doing work at the intersections of race, performance,
and alienation studies, Daphne Brooks examines “alienation” as a loaded term in both
theatre criticism and diaspora studies. That is, she suggests that alienation as a state of
being and a creative process containing multiple layers of meaning for the ways in which
theatre is written about and discussed, and how particular people experience mass
dislocation and dispersal across the diaspora. I build on her analysis to consider the
position—that is, the state of being—of the alien other and the process of alienation
within the context of the contemporary art world, and how these women of color artists
navigate both the limiting discourses of both feminist and black art history. Furthermore,

1
It is important to note, that Adrian Piper’s early work also participates in this kind of direct
address approach to alienation. Specifically, Piper’s Mythic Being series, which is discussed in
the introduction, relies heavily on the “alien” and out of turn enactments of the Mythic Being,
which Piper conceptualizes as a black man.
2
As argued throughout the chapter, O’Grady and Fusco employ these strategies similarly to the
courageous figures in Daphne Brooks’ work: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of
Race and Freedom (1850-1910) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
122
I continue with an underlying concern regarding critical spectatorship, which includes the
spectating and the critical observations of the artists themselves.
In this chapter, mixed media is discussed alongside performance—usually
recognized as two distinct practices—in order to highlight the multilayered complexity of
the works discussed throughout. Mixed media is the combination of multiple materials
and/or mediums within a single work of art. These materials range from multi-
dimensional constructions of photography and paint, to wood, metal, old and recycled
papers and bottles, to sculptural collages, body paint, sound, and performance-centered
works. This category is broad and nebulous; however, I explore mixed-media approaches
alongside definitions of direct address and theories of alienation effect(s).
3
Mixed-media
art refuses aesthetic purity and medium specificity. As an artistic methodology, mixed
media draws upon a combination of materials the artist determines are necessary or
useful to the work as a whole. At times these amalgamations are heavily process-based,
as with the work of Adrian Piper, Ellen Gallagher, and South African artist Tracey Rose.
4

And just as the mismatched material signification of this practice subverts hard and fast
adherence categories delineated by medium, artists of color have been taking up mixed
media and mixed-methods for decades in order to undermine race, gender, and stagnant
identity categorization.
5
Many artworks also incorporate dance, theatrical performance,

3
Theatre practitioner and theorist Bertolt Brecht developed the conception of the “alienation
effect,” however, in this chapter I move through Brecht quickly in order to highlight the ways
women identified artists of color as well as feminist theorists have produced their own alienation
effects—many initially inspired by Brecht, and many still completely original in their approaches.
4
For examples of process-based work, see Ellen Gallagher’s eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004-
05) or Adrian Piper’s photo-text collages in the Decide Who You Are Field Work series (1992)
5
In an interview with artist Mark Steven Greenfield for another research project, the artist noted
that in many instances it was access to materials that led artists of color (in Los Angeles in
particular) to adopt hodge-podge materials based on what one could find—developing their
aesthetic out of necessity. Furthermore, Greenfield is an artist whose work in abstraction
123
and other bodily enactments as central forms of the artistic expression. Furthermore,
mixed-media performance practices are culminations of enormous creative labor and
expertise, which is necessarily mobilized across a wide range of expressive techniques by
women of color artists in order to, as I argue, speak and exist out of turn.
These cultural innovators manage their alienation in a way that offers useful
commentary on how their bodies, as those of women identified artists of color, are always
already marked and categorized as foreign, especially when staged in western art
contexts. For example, in a bold and contentious fashion, artist Lorraine O’Grady,
performing as Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire invaded several New York galleries adorned in a
gown made of white gloves and brandishing a white floral cat-o’-nine-tails, shouting for
black art to take more risks. “Wielding her body as a tabula rasa, O’Grady’s eccentric
performance art hinted at the corporeal risks black artists could take: not the
abandonment of representational art, but rather an amalgamation of self, a fashioning of
oneself as both the subject and the object of art.”
6
O’Grady’s seemingly innocent
accessories, specifically the pristine white gloves and the stylized cat-o’-nine-tails,
became the mechanisms through which her invasive presence and out of turn lecture
signified on the aesthetic stifling of black creative producers by these very institutions
(modern and contemporary art museums, ‘special collections’ history, and mass
enslavement).
7

undermines narrow categorizations based on identity, and he often deploys within his practice
multiply creative modalities such as painting, drawing, print-making, and meditation.
6
This quotation was borrowed from the recently published work: Uri McMillan. Embodied
Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 3;
emphasis my own. This fusion of the self/object/subject will be explored and theorized in more
depth in the following chapter (Chapter 4).
7
Observations Uri McMillan makes in the introduction of his new book Embodied Avatars
(2015).
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Aliens, as deployed by the artists in this chapter, disrupt the material-semiotic
coding of “human” and/or aesthetic “reality,” which is produced by historically specific
objects, aesthetic tastes, conditions, and apparatuses of looking/viewing human subjects. I
examine the ways mixed-media “props” such as O’Grady’s white gloves (Mlle.
Bourgeoise Noire) and gold frames (Art Is…), and Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s
gold cage (Two Undiscovered Amerindians…) and interrogation room (A Room of One’s
Own) become the mechanisms through which the artists stage and/or subvert their own
alienating presence as subject/object and artist/performer/art. They use these objects to
make space and to stop time, which in turn produces a turn for their mixed media
enactments. In other words, each performance work takes its turn by carving out a
moment in the exhibition space, and perhaps disrupting the neat and tidy process of
viewing art in those contexts. Through these four objects (cage, glove, room, frame),
which each signify covering, and/or create space for the body of color to inhabit,
O’Grady and Fusco “make strange” the processes of making and exhibiting
contemporary art.
Just as our own popular understanding of extraterrestrials would be nothing
without slime, green skin, bulging eyes, flying objects, and the fierce technological
unknown,
8
much of these artists’ spectacular existence is predicated on the uncanny
utilization of objects, spaces, and artistic medium to signal their alien presence.
Furthermore, O’Grady and Fusco wield their own bodies through dynamic and complex

8
Sara Ahmed. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge,
2000. In her introductory discussion, Ahmed highlights often taken-for-granted characteristics
that are embedded in our collective psyche regarding aliens.
125
personas, or as McMillan terms them, avatars.
9
The centrality of the artist’s body is often
emphasized within performance art, and most certainly in the surrounding discourse
facilitated by curators, historians, critics, and other scholars.
10
However, the bodies of
women of color have largely been alienated from both the space and history of the
contemporary art museums, although they have not been entirely absent from Western
museum and exhibition display entirely. In fact, non-western bodies, specifically those of
women, as Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance in Two Undiscovered
Amerindians Visit … highlights, are represented in the museum Other/Alien bodies,
sources of curiosity and spectacle meant to be seen (but not heard). This mode of
representation figures deeply in the foundations of Western modernity—so much so that
Fusco’s now infamous staging of her own body was mistaken for the very phenomenon
she sought to dismantle and critique. Finally, the pointed naming of this hybrid practice
(mixed-media performance) also posits an alien existence between the mediums and
genres from which these mélange modalities originate, as well as the immense potential
they represent for theorizing audience reception and spectator engagement.
Central questions that frame this chapter are: what happens when the bodies and
voices of the artists themselves physically enter the gallery space through mixed-media
performance modalities? How do artists gather objects around themselves? What objects

9
McMillan’s framework is an important and necessary critical offering in the discourse of
performance studies, one that has richly informed and sharpened this chapter. However, this
chapter is less invested in theorizing artists’ complex personas as avatars—that work is being
done by McMillan. Instead, this chapter seeks to continue the work the dissertation as a whole
sets out to accomplish, and that is to develop the analytic of speaking out of turn in order to
theorize anew direct address art and its potential and limitations regarding spectator engagement
in contemporary art museums.
10
There are many scholars and artists who are doing this work. Having particular influence on
this chapter as a whole is the work of art historian and performance theorist Amelia Jones. Others
include Uri McMillan, Daphne Brooks, Judith Butler, and Monica Miller.
126
(and subjects) gather? And finally, what then is the relationship to spectators, and how
can out of turn speech acts be understood as managing sites of engagement? I focus on
the mixed-media art of O’Grady and Fusco: Mlle Bourgeoise Noir (O’Grady 1980-83);
Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit the West (Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña 1992-
1994); A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (Fusco 2006-
2008); and Art is... (O’Grady 1983) in order to address these questions. These artists and
their work represent two key moments in performance art praxis (feminist conceptualism
and multiculturalism), as well as a shared thematic and methodological approach. That is,
both artists employ their own bodies as art process and art work through mixed-media
performance in order to enter spaces and conversations from which their bodies (and their
art) have been historically excluded. Finally, these four performances allow me to trace
how mixed-media performances create, manage, and theorize, social alienations in
various contexts.
In the last twenty years, the artist performance has become so much a staple in
discourses of contemporary art that its history and conceptual framework has achieved an
aura of verisimilitude.
11
One might suggest that there is little left to visualize or articulate
about the artist performance, and, surely, the alienation effect, that has not already been
presented. Yet in this chapter, I reconceptualize the history and articulation of the artist
performance by analyzing the works of women of color artists whose art is reliant on the
very problem of violent silence, erasure, and even death that motivates and informs their
physical performances. Inspired by historical enactments of liberation and self-
determination, I use conceptual art performances of radical (out of turn) presence to

11
As Amelia Jones notes in The Artist’s Body (Phaidon Press, 2012), the artist performance and
its conceptual framework(s) have achieved this position of assumed authenticity and “truth” in
contemporary art discourse.
127
suggest that it is through alien bodies, effects, and mixed-media acts that direct address
art achieves a different kind of political agency for women of color speaking out of turn
in and against the contemporary art museum.
12
By political agency, I refer to the ways in
which bodies exist differently even as performing bodies within contemporary art
contexts, offering these artists a trenchant mode through which to speak, have voice, and
be present in these disciplinary or unwelcoming spaces. For women of color specifically,
whose enactments work against a kind of respectability politics that always already
signifies their presence as disruptive and inappropriate, their dissonant mixed-media
performances give purchase to alternative ways of being art, spectator, and human. As
one epigraph found in the introduction suggests, marginality may be “more of a blessing
than a curse, as alienation, too, has its uses.”
13
Thus, the violent silencing of women
identified artists of color, and the erasure of their art, itself presents a productive origin
point for thinking about performance through women identified artists of color, precisely
because, as McMillan suggests, alien bodies have their uses. This is an important
intervention to mobilize through Piper and then McMillan for the very reason that to exist
and to speak out of turn is to strategically deploy one’s voice and presence in ways that
rupture expectations of the status quo. These performances of alienation suggest that this
work is often more salient when conducted from the margins of visibility—visibility
being key a tactic for intervening in contemporary art spaces.

12
This chapter, along with the dissertation, challenges the marginalization of women identified
artists of color artistic practice within the art world understandings of feminist art, and the
disavowal of non-white artists as participating in (and frankly, initiating) the history and
production of the avant-garde. As I suggest in my introduction, performance art and the art of
performance must begin prior to its art world historiography of a limited white and male
dominated cannon.
13
“In many ways, I regard my marginality as more of a blessing than a curse, as alienation, too,
has its uses.” –Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I: Essay”
128

The Cage: Social Gest and Intercultural Performance
“What follows are my reflections on performing the role of the noble savage
behind the bars of a golden cage.”—Coco Fusco
14

One of the most obvious objects of containment is the cage. The gold cage that
artist and academic Coco Fusco and fellow artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña constructed as
part of their traveling performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West
(1992-1994) signifies on the history of physical enclosures used to control bodies of color
for the purpose of display. The human cage has a specific colonial history, and before
that human cages served (and still serve) the purpose of housing criminals, war captives,
and curious or abhorrent bodies maintained for arena sport and later, court entertainment
for the European ruling classes.
Fusco begins her 1994 essay, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,”
with the above statement in defense of her controversial collaborative performance with
Gómez-Peña. Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (TUA) (FIG. 15) was
originally conceived by the artists to facilitate satirical commentary on Western concepts
of the primitive Other. The mixed-media performance lasted three days, as the artists
lived in a golden cage, presenting themselves as undiscovered natives from a fictitious
island in the Gulf of Mexico called Guantinau. Fusco and Gómez-Peña performed a
variety of tasks, “which ranged from sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to watching
television and working on a laptop computer” (Fusco 1994). The pair also took
donations, and for a small fee, Gómez-Peña would ramble nonsensically and Fusco

14
Coco Fusco. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” in TDR (1988-), Vol. 38, No. 1.
(Spring, 1994), pp. 143-167.
129
would dance to rap music. Reminiscent of the work of performance artist James Luna
during the same time, the pair would also pose for pictures with visitors.
15
Eating food
fed to them by spectators, the artists would only leave under guarded escort to use the
restroom. Finally, most of their caged performances were accompanied by extensive
falsified and factual literature on the island of Guantinau and its inhabitants, and
simulated encyclopedic entries complete with fake maps of the Gulf of Mexico, as well
as a chronology with highlights from the history of exhibiting non-Western peoples.
Shortly after their performative debut at the EDGE ’92 Biennial (May, 1992) in
Columbus Plaza in Madrid, the artists were faced with several unexpected realities. For
example, an overwhelming portion of the public assumed that all or part of the artists’
fictional identities were authentic, and “a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and
cultural bureaucrats” sought to shift the focus from the substance of Fusco and Gómez-
Peña’s social experiment to the “moral implications” of their dissimulation (Fusco 1994).
Despite these responses, the performance continued for two years and traveled around the
globe to several major western cities and museums. The cage, and its eerie faculty of
“making strange” and unrecognizable both the bodies of the artists and the historical
context those bodies sought to critique, represents some of the limitations of this kind of
out of turn enactment. That is, the cage was all too familiar territory that has yet to be
removed from the tastes and psyches of western audiences—which ironically, was
integral to the artists’ performative commentary.

15
James Luna is a Native American installation and performance artist. He is most well known
for his installation-performances as an artifact “from the past,” where he spent hours lying in a
museum vitrine complete with anthropological labels. Another famous work, and the reason for
his reference here, is his “Take a Picture with a Real Indian” performances. In these performances
Luna would dress in a range of attire from traditionally worn leather hide to jeans and a t-shirt
offering for museum and gallery goers to “take a picture with a real Indian.”
130
The colonial history of the cage, although often ignored in past discussion of this
work, is essential to the creation and exhibition of TUA. As Fusco’s essay suggests,
performance art in the West did not originate with Dadaist “events.” Instead, she argues
for performance art’s conception during the earliest days of Conquest, when indigenous
peoples were extracted as “aboriginal samples” and brought to Europe for scientific
analysis and entertainment.
16
As part of the installation, facts and timelines of the last 500
years regarding this practice were included, and acknowledged the hundreds of
“Australian, Aborigines, Tahitians, Aztecs, Iroquois, Cherokee, Ojibways, Iowas,
Mohawks, Botocudos, Guianese, Hottentots, Kaffirs, Nubians, Somalians, Singhalese,
Patagonians, Terra del Fuegans, Kahucks, Anapondans, Zulus, Bushman, Japanese, East
Indians, and Laplanders [who] have been exhibited in the taverns, theatres, gardens,
museums, zoos, circuses, and world’s fairs of Europe and the freak shows of the United
States.”
17
And although much of the accompanying exhibited content was largely
fabricated, the historiography of such spectacles was not. This information cited well-
known bodies on display such as “The Hottentot Venus” (Saartje Benjamin, 1810-1815),
General Rivera’s stolen Uruguayan Charrúas (1834), and Ota Benga, the first “pygmy” to
visit America after the slave trade in 1906. The exhibition content also included lesser
known exploited others such as Zulu Chief Cetewayo (1879), Maximo and Bartola, two
microcephalic San Salvadorans who toured Europe and the Americas billed as “the last
Aztec survivors of a mysterious jungle city called Ixinaya” (1853-1901), and “Tiny

16
Coco Fusco. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” pp. 146.
17
Ibid.

131
Teesha, the Island Princess,” who was a black woman midget exhibited at the Minnesota
State Fair (1992).
What is interesting about the artists’ choice of performance space is that while the
concept of out of turn speech or actions suggests a breaking out of such enclosures and/or
working against their moment of reconstruction, Fusco and Gómez-Peña erect a system
of containment. In doing so, the artists make space for their bodies to exist within the
contemporary art and museum contexts to which their performance traveled (much like a
circus). Perhaps not ironically, but maybe unexpectedly, this all too familiar object was
quite at home in these Western exhibition locales and among its predominantly Western
(American) spectators.
In order to speak out of turn, Fusco and Gómez-Peña get in a cage. They make
strange the site of the museum, their own bodies (as artists), and the practice of viewing
“art,” specifically performance art (humans on display). This estrangement that takes
place “sutur[es] together hybrid and sometimes profane cultural materials to rewrite
categories of self-representation.”
18
Furthermore, these artists experimented with ways to
express the dissonant historical relationship between bodies of color and the dominant
culture that sought to put them on display, and plotted ways to draw attention to and
subvert that dissonance.
19
While Fusco’s post-performance commentary sometimes
focused on harshly critiquing her audiences rather than further theorizing the
performance itself, TUA opens up the immense possibility for agency while in the, or a,
cage. That is, for those on display to perform their roles or exert their bodies differently. I

18
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 6)
19
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent.
132
recognize these efforts to be aligned with the Afro-alienation acts and effects Daphne
Brook’s work so powerfully traces.
There are moments in Fusco’s “reverse ethnography” of her experiences that may
be interpreted as pleasure and play for those who are contained—two things generally not
discussed when dealing with the fraught history and practices of human beings who are
non-consensually on display. However, Fusco not only consented to her entrapment, but
also, through her own creative praxis, mobilized the resources and produced the very
occasion for the staged display of her body in such a way. So perhaps the most glaring
omission in the self-reflexive discourse created around the performance was in fact their
inclination towards play and their experiences of pleasure while in their enclosure.
Furthermore, the artist also speaks of the privilege of leaving the cage after finishing a
performance. A complicated position as performance artist Tracey Rose reminds us—
“performance work is incredibly exhausting…because you don’t walk away from it. I
mean, how can you walk away from your body? The art was in the process, the entire
thing was a performance, and the entire thing was the work of art.”
20
The fatigue—the
residual effects left on the performer’s body—is inescapable. This complex notion of
pleasure through agentive laboring within the confines of a golden cage gestures toward
what this performance opens up through alienation, by making visible the conditions
through which bodies of color within this spaces have historically been made spectacle—
hypervisible and yet silenced. Said another way, Fusco and Gómez-Peña strategically
employ the alien other, manufacturing their own alienation in order to produce an

20
Artist Tracey Rose in 2008.
133
occasion for these (their) bodies to be seen and engaged anew. Indeed, a fraught and risky
move to make.
Fusco and Gómez-Peña manifest the counter-normative tactics of speaking and
existing out of turn, in order to return to the gruesome historical memory of marginalized
“others” moving through cage, ship, exhibition, zoo, and fair as curiosities, precisely to
point towards the remnant and ghostly ways this history and these practices remain
resolute in museums today. In her reverse ethnography of the multiple staged
performances across the globe, Fusco recounts what it is like to experience Du Bois’
“second sight,” the peculiar position of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,”
and in Fusco’s case, through the bars of her cage. This position of observation as
object/subject evolved into what Brechtian feminist Elin Diamond describes as the
enlivened position of “looking at being looked at ness.”
21
That is, the critical position
from which the object of the gaze not only looks back, but creates a space to examine the
situation of observation in ways that are pleasurable, liberatory, and at times,
confrontational. In many ways, Fusco and Gómez-Peña answer the Brechtian call for
artists and actors to adapt “socially critical” strategies in their performances, in order to
generate alienation effects and to provoke audiences in ways that force them to
reexamine history and their role in its production and perpetuation. However, their work
enters the slippery labor of “defamiliarizing their own bodies by way of performance in
order to yield alternative racial and gender epistemologies” that are then lost on their

21
Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. 1 edition. (London; New
York: Routledge, 1997).
134
audiences.
22
“By using performance tactics to signify on the social, cultural, and
ideological machinery that circumscribes African Americans [and individuals of color
more broadly], they intervene in the spectacular and systemic representational abjection
of black peoples.”
23

Two Undiscovered Amerindians invokes anti-realist forms of performance and
cultural expression to call attention to the hegemonic categories that structure both
anthropological museums and contemporary art discourse. Here it is instructive to shift
attention towards reading this satirical set of conditions in the context of Brecht’s social
gest.
24
In his work, a gest can be located under the rubric of epic theatre, or modern
theatre, as Brecht has sometimes referred to it. Simply stated, epic theatre provokes
spectator self-reflection and promotes a critical position in regards to the narrative arc
and the performance taking place on stage. Brecht has often critiqued dramatic or
climatic performance genres for inciting audience complacency. Rather than facilitating
audience complacency, epic theatre seeks to effect a social justice consciousness and
radical change in the world outside the theatre. The same might be suggested of O’Grady
and Fusco’s work and their deployment of direct address strategies in their own epic
performances.
25

22
Borrowing heavily from Brooks’ concise reading of Du Bois, Souls (5), Diamond, Unmaking
Mimesis (52); and Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” “A Short Organum for
the Theatre,” in Willett, Brecht on Theatre.
23
Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent, 349.
24
For the purpose of my discussion, Brecht’s notion of Gestus (or social gest) is derived from
John Willet’s 1964 edited and translated volume, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an
Aesthetic.
25
Director Erwin Piscator, who sought to encourage playwrights to address concerns related to
“contemporary existence,” originally coined the term epic theatre. Piscator wanted to see new
subject matter staged through innovative effects, and spectator interactions that would distance
rather than captivate and mystify.
Innes, C.D. (1972). Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
135
Brecht unified some of these central ideas and strategies within his work, and
towards the latter half of his career, epic theatre was used to describe the style of theatre
Brecht pioneered.
26
Brecht, as part of epic theatre’s dynamic repertoire, developed the
technique Gestus.
27
Carrying the dual meaning of both the physical gestures and attitude
(“gest”) of an artist or performer, Gestus is a mechanism by which “an attitude or single
aspect of an attitude” is made evident, or is “expressible in words or actions.”
28
When it
comes to the work of Fusco, specifically her performances with Gómez-Peña in the
golden cage, I argue for an understanding (not disconnected from Brecht’s) of gestus as
an embodiment of attitude or particular subject positions, which evidences impetuses and
transactions that underpin a performative exchange between artist and objects, or artist
and spectators. Additionally, the narration of the character by the artist, or the epic nature
of their performance carries another embodied meaning of the gestus. That is, meaning is
made through this technique as artist becomes object and object/artist are displayed for
spectators. Mixed-media props, like the golden cage staged in the public space of cultural
institutions, shape the gestus and its potential to articulate through the performing bodies
and implicate spectators. Finally, both Fusco and O’Grady’s work points toward what it
means for this exchange (the gestus) to manifest itself within a work of art not wholly

26
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre, 281.
27
What is particularly useful for this discussion on raced and gendered performances in
contemporary art is that a Brechtian gestus makes visible artists’ (or characters’) social relations
and the causality of their behavior, as interpreted from a historical materialist perspective.
According to Elizabeth Wright, “every emotion” when treated under the heading of gestus,
“manifests itself as a set of social relations” (Elizabeth Wright. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-
Presentation. (New York: Routledge, 1987), 27. As Brecht insists, “...it is what happens between
people that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter” (Brecht,
1949, 200).
28
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre, 42.
136
performative. Posed another way, how might we understand the afterlife of these bodies
on display? Do the remnants or displayed “artifacts” maintain this gestic quality?
In ways similar to Adrian Piper’s invitation to spectators in her installation
Cornered,
29
TUA also sets out (and perhaps fails) to liberate spectatorial perspective and
subvert oppression by way of resisting a complete character transformation or level of
historical authenticity.
30
This can be seen in their costume design choices and their
fictitious maps, cultural histories, and gathered artifacts. Instead of the desired or perhaps
anticipated responses from the audience members themselves, Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s
performance captures the mythical nature of their avatars’ existence—alien and other—in
suspension with their own bodies as a way for spectators to discover what the artists are
not doing.
31
The artists hold difference in suspension by resisting complete
transformation into these fictitious indigenous caricatures. They perform contemporary
rap lyrics, watch television, and utilize modern technologies all within the cage as if to
rupture, or at the very least signal to spectators the disjuncture between the their
fantastical expectations of indigenous bodies on display and the artists’ body performing
social critique. Perhaps Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s performances of social gest (or a
series of social gests) does not quite accomplish this work. Perhaps, speaking out of turn,

29
For a discussion and analysis of Piper’s Cornered, see Chapter 1.
30
The artist’s attitude is also an important consideration within conceptions of gestus, as this
attitude is embodied as an act of epic narration—the ‘showing’ that is ‘shown’ in the ‘showing’—
to use Brecht’s turn of phrase. I, along with Brecht, am interested in the “political” basis from
which an artist (here, Fusco) interprets her role and develops her own alien existence through this
caged character’s gestus—a process that inevitably involves exploration of a set of concrete and
actual behaviors, and then mobilizing them according to principles and direct address strategies of
selective realism. Furthermore, this creative modality provides a unique occasion to marginalized
figures (specifically, the artists themselves) to experiment within the repertoire of out of turn
speech using innovative methods for critiquing and deconstructing the conditions of exploitation,
silencing, and violent oppression by these cultural institutions. In this way, the artists perform
their own unique versions of revisionist cultural politics.
31
This reading of the performance was inspired by Brooks’ reading of minstrel performances
through Brecht. (Brooks 2006, 28).
137
as I argue in Chapter 1, can be equally productive when it fails. These failures occur for a
variety of reasons, but pointedly reveal the possibilities and limitations of alien bodies
and alienation.
The unsettling iconography of the caged body of color—the non-white, non-
western body—in captivity remains a central urtext of alienation in colonial history and
transatlantic visual culture. Daphne Brooks articulates it this way: “[h]egemonic
hermeneutics, specifically those of conquest, colonialism, global imperialism, and later,
anthropology, eugenics, and natural history consistently render caged and exploited
bodies as ‘infinitely deconstructable ‘othered’ [and alien] matter.’”
32
Yet there are ways
to read for the viability of Fusco and Gómez-Peña making use of their own materiality
within narratives in which they are the subjects. That is, despite the slippery nature of the
performance, we read the artist body, performer, and art object within and against the
grain of historical narratives of colonialism and oppression.
33
Fusco and Gómez-Peña put
their own figures to work for their own aesthetic and political uses and “image their own
bodies” in such a way to “set up a constructive dialogue between poststructuralist and
humanist views of identity.”
34
This concept is explored further in the following chapter
on self-portraiture as both a critical site for self-imaging and constructive dialogue, both
solicited by contemporary institutions and subverting these organizing hierarchies of

32
Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent, 6.
33
Amelia Jones has written and curated some of the principle work on this exact phenomena in:
Amelia Jones, in The Artist’s Body. (Phaidon Press, 2012).
Amelia Jones eds. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. (Intellect Ltd., 2012).
Amelia Jones eds. Performing the Body/Performing the Text. (Routledge. 1999).
Amelia Jones. “Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” in Art
Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of
This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 11-18.
34
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent.
138
visibility to produce their own dissonant, and alien presence. Fusco and Gómez-Peña,
along with all the artists within this dissertation, constantly experiment, through their
direct address art, with doing their bodies otherwise in public spaces.
35

The Aggressive Productivity in Failure
It seems impossible to argue whether or not particular audience members “got” or
did not “get” the range of performances that made up TUA. Fusco’s written defense
suggests that children and presumably indigenous individuals seemed to display the most
“human,” or perhaps, most desired responses. Furthermore, Fusco notes that the gendered
responses had much to do with the kinds of liberties spectators were willing to take, and
the demands they made of the artists. Several of the responses Fusco documents in her
reverse ethnographic reflections on the performance reveal the widespread difficulty
Western spectators have when confronted with racial artifice specifically, but race in the
museum in general. That is, museums and spectators alike have struggled to engage with
and address issues of race in the space of the museum. That said, it is perhaps no surprise
that spectators would then be equally unwilling or ill-equipped to engage with and
respond to the racial artifice presented in a piece like TUA. Like so many practitioners
before them, Fusco and Gómez-Peña disturbed and disoriented the expectations of
museum spectators who were shocked to find that the artists were not as “primitive” as

35
The reactions, however, to these differently performing bodies are as varied and complex as the
artists’ enactments. Fusco asserts that their performance in the cage was designed to be
interactive, one focusing less on what the artists themselves were doing inside the cage, and more
so on how their audiences interacted with them and interpreted their caged existence. It was the
artists’ belief that when experiencing an “uncanny” or disorienting encounter (such as the cage
performance), spectators’ “defense mechanisms are less likely to operate with their normal
efficiency.” Thus, caught off guard, spectator’s true beliefs were more likely to surface and be
made evident. (Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,”148)
139
they expected. This is also indicative of spectator’s desires for “the real” or an authentic
experience when entering into museums.
36

The conversation Fusco initiated in her essay response on whether or not
spectators understand the performance is an interesting one to have with direct address
performance works in particular. This is because most of the art discussed within the
dissertation has an interpellative call or implicating critique. As argued in Chapter 1, and
as seen in the aftermath of Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, there are
various risks and serious ramifications when performances miss their audiences, or when
audiences simply turn away. As Sturken and Cartwright argue, “…[M]eanings are
created in part when, where, and by whom images are consumed, and not only when,
where and by whom they are produced”(2009: 46).
37
For Judith Sebesta, performance,
specifically feminist performances, are about “the play of subversion versus fulfillment,
of safety versus risk, of efficacy versus inefficacy, among audience members.”
38
Thus,
with direct address art, those who are being addressed are equally a part of the
construction of the piece and its critical afterlife. When speaking out of turn, those who
have historically sought to claim or take up space and produce visibility (or an occasion
to be heard) often depend on a response from their audiences. As discussed in the
Introduction with the legal case of Ms. V, or Frederick Douglass’ or Maria Stewart’s
speeches, speaking out of turn is a powerful strategy, but one that often elicits an angry or
confused response, which can have serious (and often violent) repercussions. Or, as with

36
Here, I am referring to the ideological collapse between “art museums” and “nature history
museums,” which I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 1.
37
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2
nd
Edition, 2009), 46. This quote was originally retrieved from
Audience Participation (Klein, 110).
38
Judith Sebesta “Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance,” in Audience
Participation ed. Susan Kattwinkel (2003).
140
the later discussed piece by O’Grady, Art Is…, the spectator’s participatory response was
in fact the art (an alien avant-garde performance).
In other cases, while the interpellative nature of the direct address creative work is
inherent in its form, the art is not dependent on an immediate or participatory audience
response, per se.
39
Fusco’s response to the performance’s reception makes it clear that
TUA was reliant on particular responses from its spectators in order to complete the work.
However, despite the presumed failings of the audience to “get it” and then respond
accordingly, there is productivity to be read in this gap between artist, the spectator, and
the work of art (the performance). Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s performance challenges
the way we think (and perhaps how Fusco thinks) about alienation effects and their
function in performance works, especially when such performances are dependent on
spectator responses. It is my contention that these strategies and effects must and do take
place, and their effectiveness should not be determined based on an expected or desired
response from spectators alone. Rather, these out of turn enactments should be read
through their radical ontological functions. That is, a particular enactment’s ability to
fundamentally shape-shift categories of viewership, while at the same time, its circulation
as art reveals the conditions of the work’s existence as art in the space of contemporary
art museums.
One of these functions is revealed through what Daphne Brooks refers to as a
“spectacular opacity.” This cultural phenomenon emerges at varying times and across the

39
Such is the case for the text-based works discussed in Chapter 2. Just as most literature is not
dependent on a particular response from its readers, direct address and speaking out of turn that is
manifested in textual art may solicit a response, but does not require one. As argued in the
previous chapter, this art is a consummate example of the interpellative function of an ideological
calling, an intimate capture of its spectator’s subjectivity without the one being hailed actually
becoming marked as such at the moment of encounter.
141
spatial and temporal logics of the golden cage as a performance space—as a product of
the performer’s will or design—and as seen above, as a “visual obstacle erupting as a
result of the hostile spectator’s epistemological resistance to reading alternative racial and
gender representations.”
40
Fusco and Gómez-Peña attempt to remain the artist while also
“showing” the Amerindian character for the museum spectators in question, engaging in
a method that the characters in Brook’s text Bodies in Dissent innovate. This mode of
alienation prefigures Brecht’s twentieth-century efforts to create a theatre in which the
actor’s self-reflection, artful and artistic act of self-alienation prevents audiences from
losing themselves in the narrative or individual characters completely.
41
This vantage
point enables an understanding of Fusco’s and Gómez-Peña’s ambitious efforts to
perform the hyphenated self, a kind of Afro-Indigenous-Colonized alienation effect.
42

The ethnographic impulse in both Fusco’s performance and writing about her experiences
is undeniable. However, her aim to display “the native” in this way, perhaps, rather than
reveal a failure in perception on the part of the audiences, actually marks a failure in
theorizing such a performative intervention’s opportunities and limitations.
There is immense potential for both TUA and Fusco’s A Room of One’s Own, to
catalyze inquiries into practices of spectatorship through their alien and alienating
performances.
43
Furthermore, during the multiple staged performances of TUA, the
guards and keepers emerge as a surrogate audience, one whose role is marked by invested
witnessing, as well as privileges in managing other spectator interactions. Their
investment in the witnessing process stems from a mutual investment in the maintenance

40
Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent, 8.
41
Again, both Bertolt Brecht and Daphne Brooks are instructive here.
42
Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent, 224.
43
My line of thinking here is informed by the arguments made in Michel Foucault’s book
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
142
and management of the museum space. Surveillance becomes central in the construction
of the piece as the alien bodies of the artists must be monitored and managed, but so too
the bodies of the viewing public. Thus, the work in all its opportunities and failures
moves beyond the history of human display, spectacular performances and museum
practices. TUA stages a contemporary experiment (intentional or not), one that mirrors
the uncanny systematic procedural looking that has infiltrated western society in the time
since Michel Foucault published his prophetic work. This mixed-media performance
reflects not only the technologically advanced prison industrial complex, but also
museums, schools, parks and public areas, domestic spaces, and of course, localities at
the forefront of national security. Those considered “outside” or “other” are never safe
from, in this context, the national or colonial gaze. This is a gaze that permeates and is
deployed in the most restricted of places, such as Guantanamo Bay, for instance.
Described another way, Donna Haraway has discussed these optical
epistemologies as processes of “diffraction,” rather than reflections:
Diffraction patterns record the history of interactions, interference, reinforcement,
difference… Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere,
in more or less distorted form... Rather, diffraction is a metaphor for another kind
of critical consciousness… (emphasis my own).
44

It can be said that the effort of these mixed-media performances to interpellate spectators
within the material-semiotic discourses of each performances relies partly on the optics of
diffraction. Haraway elsewhere notes that this diffraction, “is not a reflection; it’s a

44
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse:
Feminism and Technoscience. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 273.

143
record of passage.”
45
That is, just because, for instance, the audience did not necessarily
respond in the way Fusco and Gómez-Peña envisioned, does not mean the alienating
history of caged bodies was not “diffracted” throughout the act of looking the audience
engaged in. When performance artists of color speak and exist out of turn within the art
museum, this record is the imprint the art leaves on the bodies, psyches, and spaces that
they encounter.

“A Room of One’s Own”: Direct Address Art and the Performance of In/Security
Coco Fusco’s solo performance “A Room of One’s Own”: Women and Power in
the New America (2006-2008) (FIG.16) is another important act of disruption enabled by
a direct address approach. Although invited to speak (as an artist) at a museum-sponsored
symposium on feminist creative practice, Fusco speaks (performs) out of turn—and out
of sync in order to level a critique at the establishment of the museum itself. She
performs out of sync with the academic conference by making a critical departure from
more traditional presentation styles, at times going “off script,” in order to draw an
important parallel between art and military institutions through satire. In doing so,
Sergeant Fusco directs our attention towards the interwoven workings of power,
surveillance, silence, and the making and performing of particular kinds of
citizen/subjects/enemy combatants/art objects/interrogators. But how does the
contemporary art museum end up in partnership with U.S. global military presence? How
are visual culture and security discourses linked? How is a refusal of feminism (and

45
This is read through Joanne Klein, “Looking at Looking (at looking): Experiments in the
Interrogation of Spectating” in Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance. Eds.
Sudan Kattwinkel (2003)
--Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf, 103, (emphasis in-text added).
144
feminist expression), as suggested by Sergeant Fusco, at the cusp of both institutional
foundations—that of art and the military?
Unfortunately, I am not in the position to fully address these questions within the
context and arguments laid out in this chapter. However, Fusco’s work—her alien visual
interpellation—exists at the precipice of scholarly discourse and artistic intervention, and
is well suited for advancing this conversation centered on alienation as a methodology,
one that utilizes mixed-media props to do the work on complicating art spectatorship. A
Room of One’s Own is both/and: it is both scholarly discourse and artistic intervention,
and I use the space here to continue my line of thinking on the direct address deployment
of an alien or out of place body, the process of alienation and the act of alienating one’s
audience. Perhaps ironically, Fusco’s performance of anti-feminism through Sergeant
Fusco’s venomous claims against the ongoing feminist movement is most decidedly a
feminist gesture. While Fusco’s work uses security discourse to do this specific feminist
work, art, performance art has demonstrated a unique ability to radically reorient
spectators to larger conversations on security and global structures of power.
Specifically, in the MoCA performance, Sergeant Fusco devises “tactics for
gender management,” specifically, a “6 Step Program” for subverting feminism in the
military as an undertaking necessary for ensuring national security and women’s role in
the ongoing project of democracy. The contradiction between efforts to “subvert
feminism” and “ensure...women’s role in the ongoing project of democracy” is the
central tension this performative program highlights.
46
For those who are familiar with
the work of Virgina Woolf’s essay from which this performance gets its name, the

46
Quotations in this section were taken from the performance itself, which can be viewed online
here: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/16/161
145
performance strategically unsettles audience expectations. Fusco mobilizes a woman’s
need for creative solitude (the inspiration for Woolf’s essay) as an opportunity to exploit
her as a mediator of violence, war, and patriarchal oppression.
Fusco elaborates her six steps for an audience of art world participants by drawing
neat comparisons between U.S. military and art world efforts in this endeavor. In a tone
of great enthusiasm and veneration, Sergeant Fusco outlines the ways in which the art
world subverts feminism and strategically deploys female bodies to accomplish similar
projects of security and democracy while shoring up economic-based strivings towards
the “democratized space of the museum.” This project of democratization functions not
to benefit more diverse demographics (such as women in this case), but instead, both the
art world and military (as Sergeant Fusco alludes) capitalize on these inclusions for
profit. This 6 Step Program in gender management is solely reliant on the control and
strategic implementation of the female body. The Program highlights the ways art’s
global and commercial networks undermine feminist creative futures, as well as, a U.S.
military future outside of the global security crisis. Fusco’s project overall, makes strange
the familiar goals and investments of Western/white/U.S. feminism and reveal their
connections to global systems of dominance.
As Fusco did by performing as a military sergeant on a panel of art historians at a
convening entitled, “The Feminist Future,” I insert her performance with its immense and
complicated possibilities into the larger conversation happening on global security
discourse and the interlocking systems at play in global security directives.
47
Fusco states
early in her MoCA appearance: “interrogation is a form of performance for an audience

47
This section of Chapter 3 was recently presented at a conference on “security discourses,”
which convened in Turku, Finland (October 2015). Utilizing the performance art of Coco Fusco,
this paper complicated how national and global security is discussed and enacted.
146
of one.” Taking this designation seriously, perhaps national security too should be
considered part of this performance (or a performance in and of itself)—in fact, Fusco’s
performance suggests that interrogation is indeed central to security discourse’s cultural
production. It is important to consider the implications of her artistic intervention and the
critiques she levels at both the U.S. military and the art world simultaneously, in order to
propose new tools to achieve a better understanding of both institutional spaces. Perhaps
it is most useful to start with those offered by theater and performance scholars.
For example, putting an important spin on several of Brecht’s theatrical
technologies, Fusco produces her own alienating experience for the audience through her
direct address performance. Like TUA, Fusco’s controversial and provocative “out of
turn” and strange performance challenges her spectators, who are usually art world
participants and connoisseurs, to reevaluate the workings and function of art, and in this
case, the role of women in the information extraction and terror industries. Reading the
performance through Brecht’s alienation effect reveals that alienation, as a performance
strategy, is useful for thinking about the implications of Fusco’s work in a moment when
U.S. national security it predicated on global insecurity.
48
Here, it is important to
highlight the way the artist is not only critiquing the military and art world
simultaneously, but using one (the U.S. military) to critique the other (the art world).
This, for me, is the work’s significance with regard to Fusco’s foreign and out of turn
enactment. The interrogation room, like most galleries, does not belong to women—even
when a woman agent of the state or woman artist predominate those spaces in brief (and
often fleeting) moments. Rather, Fusco’s performance forces us to reexamine the

48
While many have since moved Brecht’s theories and performance technologies in new and
necessary directions, for this conversation, returning to his work has been important.
147
representation of women in art contexts at the same time that our gaze is fixed on the
technological specters of war, in ways that highlight the degree to which women agents
and artists evolve from seemingly submissive subjects/objects of masculine power and
the gaze to playing a central role in perpetuating those very same entities.
In the same moment that Sergeant Fusco made campaign strides in various art and
intellectual spaces promoting sexual liberation as the key to global security efforts, the
2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was released. This documentary,
written and directed by Alex Gibney is a riveting investigation into the death of an
Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base. The film exposes the wanton abuse of power by
the Bush Administration and its global policy reach of detention and interrogation, which
is ultimately predicated on torture and the rescindment of human rights. The story line
highlights the ways in which the CIA and untrained soldiers utilized sexual assault, stress
positions, sleep deprivation, biting dogs, waterboarding, and other terror and torture
tactics to extract information from detainees—most of which were innocent civilians who
had been profiled, abducted, and tortured before being murdered by the U.S. military.
The centerpiece in this disturbing film is former United States Army Reserve
soldier Lynndie England. In 2005, England was one of eleven military personnel
convicted by the U.S. Army Courts-martial for torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad during the U.S.’s occupation of Iraq. England was found guilty of
inflicting physical, sexual, and psychological abuse on Iraqi prisoners of war, using
tactics that emerge satirically in Fusco’s performance. No doubt, Fusco is aware of
England’s trial and perhaps was inspired by her role as a woman in the Abu Ghraib
abduction, detention, and information extraction scheme. In the documentary, England is
148
seen wielding her own sexuality as a terror mechanism on prisoners, who were often tied
up or in stress position.
49
Perhaps most infamous is the leaked image of her posing with
fellow reservist and then fiancé Charles Graner behind a tower of naked prisoners, all of
whom had been manipulated into stress positions—presumably by England and Graner
based on the pair’s surgical gloves. Later in her trial, when other images of a sexual
nature involving England and prisoners were revealed, England relegated responsibility
to Graner, whom she claimed to love and trust, citing this as the reason for her
participation.
50
In an interview with KCNC-TV, a Denver CBS affiliate, England was
reported saying that she was given orders by her superiors to commit acts of abuse for the
purpose of psychological warfare, suggesting that because of her gender, the tactics were
more effective.
51

Two years prior to England’s trial and three before Fusco’s A Room of One’s
Own, New York based feminist art collective and art agitators The Guerilla Girls
produced a poster: “The U.S. Homeland Terror Alert System for Women.” The poster,
and its satirical alert ranking system’s metric range includes “Low,” “Guarded,”
“Elevated,” “High,” and “Severe” levels. These alert indicators are all based on the
president’s actions and declarations. “Low” signals that the “president rides around on
horse, clears brush on ranch,” and “High” that the “president declares abstinence his
favorite form of birth control and the answer to aids epidemic.” This poster emerged in

49
A stress or submission position places the human body in such a way that a large majority of
the individual’s body weight is concentrated on one or two muscles. For example, an individual
may be forced to stand on the balls of his feet, and then squat so that his thighs are parallel to the
ground. Usually, the upper extremities are also restricted (eg. hands tied behind back), which may
destabilize lower extremities, further causing stress and/or weight tension.
50
“English-language transcript of March 2008 interview with Lynndie England”. Stern magazine.
2008-03-17. Retrieved 2016-03-28.
51
Interview with KCNC-TV’s Brian Maass, which can be found here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-pictures-lynndie-england/
149
the wake of September 11
th
and during the U.S. involvement and occupation in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Viewers can imagine that in this moment the alert system has been
set to “Severe,” which indicates that the “President claims women do have rights: can
join army, fight unprovoked war, kill innocent people.”
52
Fusco’s performance (and
England’s trial) may be cause for another elevation of the risk indicator, cautioning that
not only can women do the aforementioned things, they do them on a regular basis,
adding their participation in the deployment of physical and psychological terror and
torture to the next level of threat on The Guerrilla Girl’s metric. This threat, The Guerrilla
Girl’s poster reminds us, demands our vigilance—this violence happens behind closed
doors and often with our consent and participation.
Like the gold cage, the interrogation room is a central prop in Fusco’s
performance A Room of One’s Own. Paradoxically, Fusco’s performance signifies on the
famous room in Woolf’s essay by the same title, and how Woolf imagined a space where
the female imaginary might be liberated and women’s expression uninhibited. Fusco
takes up and reproduces this 1929 meditation on place making gets taken up and
reproduced over three quarters of a century later in disconcerting ways, as an allegory for
power obtained through physical and psychological terror and violence. It is a space at
the cusp of female empowerment, according to Sergeant Fusco, one that American
women can (and have) used while engaging in the U.S. security crisis and in participating
in the global war on terror. As a performance art space, the interrogation room, similar to
the gold cage, is an ironic construction for the artists’ body. Produced out of a desire to
assert a kind of visibility and comment on histories of power, this space is a recreation of

52
Guerilla Girls, “The US Homeland Terror Alert System for Women,” viewed poster online at
the the Museum of Fine Art (Boston) web archive. Accessed 4/23/2016.
150
the same violent and oppressive spaces that have contained, surveilled, and managed
bodies of color across the globe. Ironically, the interrogation room with all of its
accouterments is a space of hypervisibility and critical examination, from which Fusco
stages an artistic intervention using her brown female body. The interrogation room is a
specter of the cage—bodies of color are still on display—exposed not for the purpose of
science or entertainment, but for the purpose of information extraction. Fusco continues
in her performance practice of strange-making from within these enclosures, specifically,
through technologies of display, vision, and now information extraction. The spectacle
that enables this violent extraction is the performance of torture.
Fusco’s work, like Brecht’s methodologies, produces effects that are strange, out
of place, or unusual, which assigns spectators a participatory role in the production.
Fusco’s mixed-media performance work compels spectators to question the constructed
environment and performing bodies, and in doing so, allows viewers (according to
Brecht) to distance themselves emotionally from social and political issues, which
necessitate academic discourse and intellectual solutions. Fusco elaborates these efforts
through another performative appearance made by Sergeant Fusco in Brazil. This
political enactment interrogated the same military practices hyperbolized in A Room of
One’s Own—staging them not only for a fine arts audience within the confines of a
lecture hall, but out in the streets of Sao Paulo—in public and in plain view.
This event was Fusco’s inaugural exploration of contemporary military scenarios
as intercultural encounters. In the age of the virtual or info-war and smart bombs, the last
“theatre of combat” between America and its “others” is occurring in the prisons/back
151
rooms/detainment sites where “enemy combatants” are being held around the world.
53

For many American soldiers in this context, the prisons are the only places where they
actually meet the enemy face to face. And precisely because these containment sites are
not considered combat zones, many women in the US armed forces are assigned to them.
Some of the most controversial images of the war on terror have emerged from these
spaces. They are depictions of ritualized humiliation of enemy combatants, usually taken
by the soldiers who operate as agents of sovereign authority. These photographs, together
with various testimonies by soldiers and interpreters who have witnessed acts of
excessive cruelty, shed some light on the uses of spectacles of subjection inside these
prisons as disciplinary conventions.
For this initial group performance in Brazil, the artist focused on the act of
cleaning the floor with a toothbrush. Reports have surfaced that American soldiers order
prisoners to clean their cells with toothbrushes for hours at a time. The artist staged a
street performance in front of the United States Consulate, in São Paulo. Performers were
dressed in the orange suits that have become an internationally recognized symbol of
detention. Performers spent the duration on their knees sweeping the street in front of the
building with toothbrushes. In this way and many other’s Fusco’s performance is truly
global in nature and in scope. The artist’s body moves across national contexts at the
same time she is engaged in local political struggles. Moreover, A Room of One’s Own
utilizes video technology in ways that have allowed even more border and context
crossing to occur. Through online platforms, several partial iterations of her out of turn

53
This assessment and the included quotations come from the artist’s website. More can be found
at: http://cocofusco.com
152
enactment can be screened across the world, amplifying its critical methodologies and the
urgent critiques Fusco levels at both the art world and the U.S. military.
Both appearances of Sergeant Fusco are examples of how direct address and
mixed-media performance art constructs a position from which to reconsider the
language and critical tools employed in interlocking social and cultural systems of power,
security, and performance—discourses where the contemporary art world and global
security networks brush up against one another, or find familiar ground in gallery and
interrogation rooms.

INVASION
In the summer of 1980, artist Lorraine O’Grady staged a series of guerilla
invasions on New York art spaces as the now notorious Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss
Black Middle-Class) (FIG.17). The first time this persona appeared was at Just Above
Midtown (JAM) during one of O’Grady’s first public performances in 1980. Dressed in
an extravagant debutante-style gown made of one hundred and eighty pairs of white
gloves, O’Grady shouted at her predominantly black audience as she ceremoniously
whipped herself with a cat-o’-nine-tails spiked with white chrysanthemums.
THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
Of super-ass…imilates…
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!
54

O’Grady’s strange and disruptive performance produces a rupture in the logics of the
New York gallery opening, in that her body and her lecture forced attendees to deal with

54
Performance transcript. Data collected from the Lorraine O’Grady Papers house at Wellesley
College, Massachusetts. Summer 2015.
153
the presence of both. Business as usual could not continue, thus, spectators had to
recalibrate the expectations of such an occasion.
O’Grady’s invasion contains several layers of meaning regarding the “alien body”
and alienation. Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire also bears witness to the presumably foreign
existence of the black middle class within both western art’s consciousness and the
psyche of black artists, most of whom circulate among middle to upper class social and
political environs. In the 1980s, the significance of the white debutante gown and gloves
would not have been lost on O’Grady’s audiences. However, these coverings (the gown
and gloves), in much the same way as Fusco’s gold cage and interrogation room, work
alongside the artist’s rebellious tone to critique the art world and its central black
participants. O’Grady uses both props and dialogue to argue that while fine art museums
and galleries begin the token selection and exhibition of a few non-white artists, the art of
black artists remains too safe and largely directed at white audiences. The artist recalls,
In 1980 when I first did MBN, the situation for black avant-garde art was
unbelievably static. For more people, the concept of black avant-garde art was an
oxymoron. Here was where you ran up against the baldest confusions and denials
about black class—not just on the part of whites but of blacks too. Avant-garde
art is made by and for a middle-class (and more occasionally, an upper class); it’s
a product of visual training and refined intellectualization. So how could blacks fit
into the equation?
55

For O’Grady, black art in this moment does not tap into the impressive range of black
expression born out of diverse histories of oppression and struggle—histories that include
education, resources, access, and a black middle class experience. The artist describes a
moment when identity categories and definitions were less fluid and where all blacks
were presumed to be poor and undereducated. Those who did not adhere to these

55
Courtney Baker (1998) E-mail Q & A with the artist. Retrieved from the Lorraine O’Grady
Papers house at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Summer 2015.
154
ascriptions were considered “inauthentic.” The most troubling part, for O’Grady, “was
how confused black artists themselves were…[y]ou had this weird spectacle of middle-
class adult artists trying to pass as street kids.”
56
Thus, for Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire, art
needed to take more risks; it had to disrupt the rubric for acceptable art produced by black
and brown folks for white audiences (and for themselves).
57
However, at the same time,
O’Grady also struggled against the pressure that mainstream black artists feel to be
“relevant” to “the community.” She conjectured that black artists exist within a wedge
that produces, on the one hand, cautiousness and fear as they wrestle with their desire “to
be seen—recognized—to be let in,” and on the other, a desire to make art that is
“relevant.” So the trappings of the glove, gown, and whip are part of O’Grady’s mixed-
method performance, and do the work of unsettling the facade of “black authenticity,”
which gets enacted across black art world participants, who perform a kind of desired
blackness for both expectant white receiving audiences, as well as presumed “black
communities.”
The artist had the performance meticulously documented—from the moment
MBN stepped out of the black hired car, her processional in and through the white-walled
gallery reception, and finally, her infamous speech and subsequent exit. The black and
white still images throw into sharp contrast both the artist’s toffee colored skin and white
dress, but also the dress, her audience members, and the space. The performance itself
experiences several iterations in its sojourn from gallery space to gallery space; however,
what seems to have remained fixed is how both the media and later exhibitions of MBN

56
Ibid.
57
This is a critique the Black Art Movement started in the early 1960s, and continued well into
the 1970s, when it was taken up and maintained by arts collectives such as AfriCOBRA, which
still exists today.
155
represented the performance. That is, the singular image of MBN standing center-stage,
neck strained, eyes bulging, and mouth agape in what appears to be a grotesque wail.
Other venues often include one or two images of the artist in the process of whipping
herself with the chrysanthemum studded cat-o-nine-tails. However, the archive contains
hundreds of images captured by the artist’s hired photographer. In fact, an overwhelming
majority of these images depict both O’Grady and her audience members smiling and
amused. O’Grady scans the room and like a pageant queen, waves to her admiring
audiences. Much of the audience members in the documentary images smile back.
This captured amusement is necessary to consider alongside possible alienation
effects, but also as a representation in a long history of avant-garde institutional critique
that may actually delight, rather than incite the institutions (and individuals) in question.
Through its re-presentation as only aggressive and offensive, O’Grady’s performance
itself becomes alienated from other possible experiences of her work that may interpellate
other more diverse political subjects, and represent more complex implications for such
events and disturbances. For example, the black middle class subject to which her
audience is actually targeted and their subsequent delight (and possible anxiety) in her
frightening iteration of the debutante ball participant.
In a 1998 interview with Duke Ph.D. candidate Courtney Baker, O’Grady offers
one of her most comprehensive analyses of the piece, discussing the intent and critical
reception of this alter-ego performance.
58
One of the most productive questions posed
during their e-mail exchange was: “Why did MBN [Mlle Bourgeoise Noire] have to
speak?” This question is particularly interesting because it builds on the arguments and

58
Interview transcripts can be found online at: http://www.lorraineogrady.com/mlle-bourgeoise-
noire
156
critical questions this dissertation foreground. The language of “have to” is also
interesting, implying a bottled up state that compels women to speak—and perhaps can
only occur out of long suffered silence. Thus, speech, and the act of being present where
one’s presence is not desired, fights against a kind of sustained silencing through directed
out of turn vocalization. For example, MBN’s invasive performance does this important
work against the sustained silencing of black visual artists in the space of the
contemporary gallery. By inserting her presence where it is generally unwelcome, MBN
takes over space not meant for her body by adorning herself in the accouterments of
respectability and then shouting at the top of her lungs—directly at her audiences.
Finally, this language of necessity is thought provoking due to the underlying assumption
that one should only speak when there is something inherently important one needs to
say. Perhaps this is a common sense clarification, but what is problematic about this
assumption is: the “who” and in “what” contexts defines and/or constitutes what is
“important” to say—that is, what is necessary, or of value.
This interview question also signals an interesting phenomenon at the level of
performance. The question is not why did artist Lorraine O’Grady have to speak, but why
this character did. O’Grady’s answer is just as telling as the question: “MBN was crazy,
wasn’t she crazy and uncool? At the same time, and not contradictorily, she was Avant
and ultra-hip. The thing about MBN is that, for me, she’s the place where the theoretical
becomes uncomfortably personal.”
59
The process of the theoretical becoming
uncomfortable—personal—is an effect of MBN’s crazy performance. The site of her
existence as an outsider, as strange and uncouth, is what initiates this process of

59
Courtney Baker (1998) E-mail Q & A with the artist. Retrieved from the Lorraine O’Grady
Papers house at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Summer 2015.
157
becoming. This alienating strategy mobilized the disruption of MBN’s physical
presence—the ways she takes up space and halts “gallery time”—like Brechtian theatre,
and seeks to abruptly “jolt” spectators out of the comfortable and familiar realm of
emotional investment in the gallery experience and the work on view there. With this
jolting invasion of the gallery space, MBN dislocates her audiences’ emotional
engagement with the current exhibition or opening cocktail hour and displaces their
attention on her own body. Her avant-garde theatrics calls her audience out on their class-
based delusions, as well as their ongoing identity crisis/identity refusal. MBN's aggressive
tone understandably derives from the very personal ways these delusions and ensuing
identity crisis disavow a claim to modernity—and therefore a claim to a black avant-
garde aesthetic. This lack signals another of the artist’s sustained critiques in the
deficiency of theoretical complexity—of risk taking—when it comes to black cultural
production within contemporary art spaces. O’Grady locates this lack as having its basis
in fear, which is “uncomfortably personal.” It is a fear of irrelevance, perhaps, or fear of
“black art” being dismissed entirely as unacceptable within the already too narrowly
conceived and legitimized creative practices of the moment.
The risks O’Grady takes in this invasion extend beyond the actual performance to
include the mixed-media objects she constructs and then smuggles into the galleries with
her. Two of the most notable are her chrysanthemum studded cat-o-nine-tails and her
now iconic white glove ball gown. The chrysanthemum alone bears a wide range of
cultural meanings and a rich symbolism far too vast to account for here. Most notably
associated with death in several countries in Europe, it also represents (at times)
lamentation and/or grief in China, Japan, and Korea. In other countries, such as the
158
United States, the flower is culturally significant in the fall, and on Mother’s Day in
Australia, which coincides with the southern hemisphere’s autumn season. The flower
has also been taken up as official flowers for several cities and several fraternal
organizations. Any one of these symbolic meanings may find unique purchase in the
artists’ own wielding of the white flower; however, none like the East Asian connotations
of lamentation (mourning) and general anguish—energy MBN emotes through her own
ritual beating and her vocal condemnation of black artists.
Most central to the focus of my chapter, however, is the white ball gown, and
more specifically, the white glove. White gloves, like gold cages, provide a kind of
enclosure for the bodies (hands in particular) of women of color. The white gloves
O’Grady collects and then fashions into a white debutante gown have their own unique
social and cultural history of containment. Throughout history, gloves have been worn as
a practical clothing item and as an accessory that delineates status, one that is imbued
with social custom and cultural meaning. The white gloves covering (quite literally)
MBN’s ornate costume are most often associated with bourgeois fashion, when white
gloves specifically were seen as a symbol of a “true lady,” elegance, and luxury—that is,
a symbol of social class and bourgeois values. Sunburned or otherwise weathered and
unprotected hands were attributed to the working class and were antithetical to feminine
beauty.
60
Thus, this loaded symbol (the white glove) creates tension when found on
women of color, and black women in particular, who were rarely afforded the
opportunities to forgo various types of labor. Moreover, when they were able to don such
an accessory, these women were rarely recognized as “ladies” or allowed the same claim

60
Cody C. Collins. Love of a Glove; the Romance, Legends and Fashion History of Gloves and
How They Are Made, by C. Cody Collins. (New York, N.Y. Fairchild Publishing co. 1945).
159
to feminine elegance as their white counterparts.
61
Part of O’Grady’s contention is the
fact that these black women of leisure do exist. In fact, the artist describes herself has
being raised in a community of doctors and lawyers, and with immense class privilege.
However, society at large is unwilling to come to terms with the possible existence of the
black middle class as being part of the black experience, or as constituting a unique black
identity, not reducible to individuals simply “acting” white.
This too is an alien existence O’Grady describes; one that many black
communities vigorously deny exists, or dismiss for its lack of “authenticity,” and which
haunts and animates MBN. Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire “drags up” this black social, cultural,
and economic world, as well as its own contradictions. MBN performs, as discussed in
the previous section, a kind of Brechtian drag via the spectacle of the debutante ball—a
coming of age ritual practiced across the black middle and upper classes. O’Grady’s work
in drag makes visible this ritual site as another complex (alien) existence. By “Brechtian
drag,” I am referring specifically to Amy Robinson’s conception, where “drag calls
attention to the act of impersonation and foregrounds its status as imitation.”
62
What is
revealed in MBN as imitation is both the ritual of the debutante ball as a coming of age
event, and the invisible pageantry of the black middle and upper classes in America.
O’Grady reminds black artists in the upper echelons of the fine art world that they are not
from “the streets,” rather from circles of privilege and opportunity that must also be
interrogated through risk taking art. In dressing up as a caricature of a black middle class

61
Monica Miller. “Crimes of Fashion: Dressing the Part from Slavery to Freedom,” in Slaves to
Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.” (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009), 77-136.
62
Judith Butler on the “drag queen” is also important here. This work can be found in Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999).
160
woman and invading art galleries, O’Grady plays a self-reflexive role that exemplifies the
very risks she feels are possible from this subject position. The imitation—or
reenactment—of black middle class privilege reveals both the foreign figure of the black
body in contemporary art display at the time, while also making visible yet another
complex and alien existence of a “Miss Black Middle-Class.”
This black bourgeois was and is quite diverse, as O’Grady notes in an interview
about attending the Afro-American Abstraction exhibition.
63
While the art was a
disappointment for O’Grady, the attending crowd was so much “more” than the art itself.
What I remember was how beautiful they were and the way they were dressed.
While I could see that, in origin, they were mostly bourgeois, they didn’t at all
dress with those referents, with looks dictated by labels or misguided propriety.
They had independent images of themselves; instead of following fashion- fascist
magazines, they reflected their own aesthetic ideas. One man was dressed in white
from head to foot, while some women were got up with wildly bright fabrics and
feathers and eccentric makeup even though it was a late winter Sunday afternoon.
I’d never seen anything like it before, whole rooms full of black people ignoring
the dictates of class and their peers. I think that I was responding to their
intelligence and independence even more than to their attractiveness. For the first
time, I felt socially NOT ALONE.
64

Thus, MBN’s gallery invasions and out of turn commentary are predicated on the artist’s
unconventional mixed-media appropriation of this symbolic trimming (the white glove).
Furthermore, her mobilization of the white glove produces a multilevel critique—a
critique born out of this alien but not alone-ness she experiences at the Afro-American
Abstraction show. First, she challenges the seemingly alien other/alien body of the black
middle class lady—a figure who dons white gloves. Second, she subverts these middle
and upper class values of elegance, grace, and women that are seen but not heard. She

63
These observations can be found in one of O’Grady’s responses to an interview with Linda
Montano.
64
This entire response was copied from O’Grady’s e-mail exchange with Courtney Baker in
1998.
161
does both of these things through performances of excess. The artist would later come to
know this attending crowd of bourgeois black art world participants as close colleagues
and friends; however, MBN would respond to the conflicting ways their art and personal
styles (and ways they existed in the world) seemed to be at odds. “It was hard not to see
how repressed most of it [the art] was, how much on its best behavior.”
65
MBN’s
excessive and out of turn performance disturbed the very organization of the black artistic
elite and drew attention to these conflicts within the black art scene in general—a scene
that, according to O’Grady, was still enmeshed in a kind of respectability politics, which
strives to eliminate rather than produce discomfort in the process of defining and
performing personal styles and producing art. “The big exception then, as now, was the
installation by David Hammons,” but O’Grady laments even the “lynch fragments” of
artist Mel Edwards “felt inoffensive and without risk.”
66
Of course, MBN troubles this
inoffensive atmosphere/aesthetic, and, one could argue, takes too many risks.
Nicole Fleetwood has termed these particular too much and too many
performances by black women as enactments of “excess flesh.”
67
Her work explores how
artists and cultural producers have taken up the “problem” of blackness in the field of
vision to draw attention to their own exclusions and erasures. Within black female artistic
traditions, deploying hypervisibility as constitutive of black femaleness is dominant
visual culture has become a strategic enactment of certain black female cultural
producers. Excess flesh enactments work through spectacular performances and

65
Courtney Baker (1998) E-mail Q & A with the artist. Retrieved from the Lorraine O’Grady
Papers house at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Summer 2015. (emphasis my own)
66
Ibid.
67
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision.

162
presentation of one’s self-image within the visual field. As Bridget R. Cooks asserts, their
presence “marks an interruption in the status quo.”
68
Fleetwood acknowledges that the
black female body is so widely studied as to become an excessive body in scholarship,
artistic production, and larger cultural debates around race, gender, and representation.
She uses this theory to attend to the ways in which black female corporeality is rendered
as surplus, over the top, and too much to handle, which is particularly useful when
discussion both O’Grady and MBN. Like Fleetwood, I am interested in “what happens
when the black female subject identifies with the aberrant images of black womanhood
offered through dominant visual culture,” and what happens when the black female artists
take up dominant representations in order to “construct new modes of operation.”
69
One
of the primary issues at stake, then, as we saw with Fusco’s cage performances, is that
embedded in the various reactions to the work by women identified artists of color is the
problem of the visible (and audible) black or brown female body, “or more precisely, that
the black female body always presents a problem within a field of vision structured by
racialized and gendered markings.”
70
These markings not only delineate the alien body,
but also the ways in which actions of alien bodies are always seen as an invasive and out
of turn.
However, there are ways this tactic of invasive and alienating presence has been
strategically and productively utilized. For example, O’Grady describes a moment of
optimism in approaching the alienation experienced by black artists from the New York
Contemporary art scene. Following a year of limbo after Linda Bryant, founder and

68
Bridget R. Cooks. Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 7.
69
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision.
70
Ibid., 109.
163
director of Just Above Midtown (JAM), had lost her 57
th
street space; the gallery was
relocated to Franklin Street in Tribeca, New York. O’Grady describes this area as an
“alternative space center,” and the gallery was “down the street from Franklin Furnace,
around the corning from Artists Space, and a few blocks up from Creative Time.”
71

O’Grady volunteered with the gallery’s opening show, Outlaw Aesthetics, and it was
when she was doing the publicity that she noticed the pervasiveness of condescension
toward black avant-garde art. It was at that opening that Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire would
appear for the first time, and it was no coincidence that the show was entitled “Outlaw
Aesthetics.” An outlaw is a fugitive being, someone who refuses governance, disavows
rules and structures for organizing (in this case) aesthetic practices, a rebel, a
nonconformist, a body or practice that is both constituted and undone by its exclusion
from legitimizing structures of existence. This same outlaw—her creative existence, and
her aesthetic positing—is very connected to my conceptions of speaking out of turn, as
outlaw aesthetic practices become both a vital methodology—a means of visibility and
survival.
MBN would go on to appear at the New Museum in September 1981. However,
despite the labors of O’Grady, Linda Bryant, and the robust talents of the JAM artists
(Howardina Pindell, Maren Hassenger, Fred Wilson, Randy Williams, Al Loving,
Houston Conwill, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons etc.), none of these efforts were
recognized in the November issue of ARTnews Magazine’s 11-page feature entitled,
“New Faces in Alternative Spaces.”
72
Instead, the pages were “chock-full of photos and
discussions of PS1, Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, the Kitchen, the New Museum,” and

71
Courtney Baker (1998) E-mail Q & A with the artist. Retrieved from the Lorraine O’Grady
Papers house at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Summer 2015.
72
Ibid.
164
others in the surrounding alternative art mecca of Tribeca. Despite Bryant’s tireless
efforts in helping to found the Downtown Consortium of Alternative Spaces—as well as
her organizing and hosting the Dialogue (1980) exhibition, for which O’Grady’s
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was created—not a single line or passing mention was
given to Just Above Midtown (JAM) in a bitter blow to black creativity and labor.
O’Grady describes this erasure as the “hole” that “black avant-garde (middle-class) art
had fallen into,” and would remain until 1988-1989, “when just as arbitrarily it would
emerge,” brought to light only to serve the needs of a white art world.
73

In 1983, during the exile of the black avant-garde, and probably fueled by the
wholesale exclusion of its most profound producers, Mlle. Bourgeoisie Noire tried again.
However, this time she did not take the covering of the white debutante gown and the
aggressive poem. Instead, she assumed the role of curator and produced an innovative
and important exhibition at Kenkeleba entitled, The Black and White Show. The artist
describes this show as “another show that disappeared without being heard”—an
interested sonic visualization of the creative labor that followed MBN as an extension to
that particular series of performances of that persona.
74
For O’Grady to say that “the
shout(s)” of MBN were rendered ineffective is useful to consider when exploring the
possibilities and limitations of direct address performance as artistic practice, but also
speaking out of turn as a way of existing within the art world itself. By describing The
Black and White Show as an extension of her shout-performance and shout-poetry,
O’Grady observes that this shouting ultimately was disappeared, drowned in the silence

73
Ibid.
74
This is an extension O’Grady does not attribute to another 1983 creative mixed-media
performance, which she staged in Harlem (discussed below).
165
(or perhaps the chaos of other shouting), never to be heard. However, O’Grady also
counters this reading of “unhearing” in other parts of her interview with Courtney Baker,
when she discusses the afterlives of MBN and how her unruly persona is taken up and
given new life (for better or worse). So, something was heard. And perhaps the better
question is not whether or not something was heard, but what resonated, and what was
heard in such a boisterous performance?
In an event deemed as an immediate success by the artist
75
, Lorraine O’Grady’s
Art Is... (1983) was a mixed media, mixed modality, multi-participant performance piece,
which made its debut as part of the 1983 African American Day Parade in Harlem, New
York. The performance event was a continuation of O’Grady’s probing critique of the
boundaries of the avant-garde from one of her inaugural performances Mlle Bourgeoisie
Noire (1980-83)
76
, O’Grady’s brand of performative alientation, on display in both
performances, is exemplary of how women of color artists might come into the field of
vision and claim a voice through the artistic medium and direct address modality of
mixed media performance—through invasion.
In the cases of both Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire and Art Is…, O’Grady’s mixed media
performance practices stage immense creative labor and expertise, which is necessarily
mobilized across a wide range of expressive techniques in order to, as I argue, speak and
exist out of turn. This alien avant-garde in similar ways to our own popular understanding
of extraterrestrials—would be nothing without the slime, green skin, bulging eyes, flying
objects, and the fierce technological unknown
77
— much of O’Grady’s and other feminist

75
www.lorraineogrady.com (web.archive)
76
Translated as “Miss Black Middle Class”
77
This language and line of thinking was borrowed from the Introduction of Sara Ahmed’s book
Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
166
artists’ spectacular existence is predicated on the uncanny utilization of objects, spaces,
artistic medium, and unacceptable bodies.
From the Galleries to the Streets
It was out of this moment, directly following Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire, that
O’Grady developed the public performance Art Is...(FIG.18-19) in order to address an
acquaintance’s assertion that “avant-garde doesn’t have anything to do with black
people.”
78
O’Grady’s dynamic response positioned avant-garde artistic sensibilities at the
center of blackness in New York—a parade celebrating black people with over a million
people in attendance—and arguably, the in nation’s artistic core. The artist described the
performance as risky and “the Harlem marching-band parade [as] alien territory” for
evidencing such an argument.
79
Thus, Art Is... became a performance piece about art
itself and questions surrounding what qualifies as art, rather than about confronting the
art world (as in her previous work). Here, the act of speaking out of turn is subverted in
O’Grady’s move away from the strategy of alien invasion taken up in Mlle. Bourgeoisie
Noire to the unexpected but heartily embraced parade-crashing visual art that was Art
Is....
As was the state of many artists of color having found only sporadic opportunity
to exhibit their work within the architectural confines of traditional art museums,
O’Grady embraced the unique format of the African American Day Parade’s use of
public outdoor space. This outdoor environment, en route through a predominantly black
community, represented a political and communal arena in which to recoup a collective
history of elision and to imagine its revision. Within this public space, the lines between

78
www.lorraineogrady.com (web.archive)
79
www.lorraineogrady.com (web.archive)
167
the hired performers and the spectators were blurred, “making the performances—like
Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, the Waves, the Wind—more congruent with modern-day
notions of ‘ritual.”
80
O’Grady’s float also obscured the lines between art and life (black
life in particular), integrating performers, artist, and spectators, and achieving what
performance art historian Lucy Lippard calls a “fundamental notion of feminist art”:
exchange.
81

Reminiscent of radical street theatre of the late 1960s and 1970s, Art Is… in many
ways functions as a democratization of art, a move that eschews the alienation of the
performers and O’Grady herself from the parade spectators and participants. This
traditional division is well-managed by the art world at large through the division of class
and labor, which results in an “art world” and “art industry,” as art and artists’ bodily
performances become a commodity for sale to an exclusive (and frequently anonymous)
audience.
82
Often, communities of color are excluded from these transactions, and their
labor (specifically, labor within these institutions) is extracted—removed from the
context of producing and managing the very spaces from which they are alienated.
83

Art Is..., along with its performers and participants, stages a counter narrative to
the art world’s narrowly conceived, strictly policed designation of the avant-garde, and
revises the notion of blackness as always already outside of or antithesis to the avant-
garde’s radical existence and creative sensibilities. Art Is... highlights this outside by
placing black and brown bodies inside the frame—intentionally, frames wrought in

80
Judith Sebesta “Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance,” in Audience
Participation. (151)
81
Lucy Lippard, “Lacy: Some of Her Own Medicine,” TDR (32.1, 1988), 73.
Judith Sebesta “Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance,” in Audience
Participation. (151)
82
Henry Lesnick, ed., Guerilla Street Theatre. (New York: Avon, 1973), 12-13.
83
Stephanie Sparling. White Walls, Black Service Bodies (unpublished essay).
168
gold—the accouterments of art’s historical legitimacy. An observation made by one of
the parade’s participants—“That's right, that’s what art is. We’re the art!”—becomes a
pointed designation as co-produced black existence within the frame becomes the
material evidence of genius. These alien geniuses,
84
like pre-established avant-garde
artists, are said to exist on the fringes, tapping into a range of under-explored possibilities
for radical substance, textuality and existence—that is, survival.

Conclusion: Productivity in Alien Effects and Otherness?
I cite what now may be common knowledge of Brecht throughout this chapter in
order to move towards feminist historians and theorists such as Daphne Brooks, who
examine “alienation” as a state of being and a creative process containing multiple layers
of meaning.
85
This meaning is central to the ways in which aesthetic production is written
about and discussed. I build on Brooks’ analysis to consider the position of the alien other
and the process of alienation within the context of the contemporary art world, and how
black women artists in particular navigate both the limiting discourses of both feminist
art history and black art history. Furthermore, both theorists’ work opens up numerous

84
I use the word “genius” here for several reasons. The first is because these bodies in such a
location and through these creative impulses would never be understood as such. In using a
concept that signals “natural ability,” I am highlighting the ways in which creative survival (and
visibility) can and should be considered a kind of specialized knowledge set—an intelligence
born on the fringes. Another reason I insert the seemingly misplaced “genius” following an
assertion of alienness, is to draw attention to the ways in which art histories of the avant-garde
have always been undergirded by an inexplicable (almost spiritual) attributed aptitude for and
positioning within creative contexts, namely the fine art world at large. Artists, who are written
into avant-garde creative movements, predominantly white and male, have never had to justify
their presumed “genius,” their specialness. Here, the creative sensibilities of O’Grady in
partnership with the residents of Harlem are ingenious, cutting edge, avant-garde, and so I name it
as such.
85
Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent, 6.

169
generative possibilities for understanding critical spectatorship, which includes the
critical observations of the artists themselves.
It is clear that O’Grady’s performances are based on critical observations of the
functions of the avant-garde and the fine art museum, including her own exclusion from
both—a radical practice that could be included in bell hooks’s foundational conception of
oppositional gazing—which is predicated on the black female spectator.
86
Specifically,
both MBN and Art Is... is reliant on the very problem of violent silence, erasure, and even
historical death, which motivates and informs the physical enactments as well as “how”
and “why” they take place. This, of course, is all part of the labor women identified
artists (in particular) perform in the process of becoming art. Inspired by historical
enactments of liberation and self-determination, I suggest that conceptual art
performances of radical (out of turn) presence, such as O’Grady’s, achieve a different
kind of political agency for women of color speaking out of turn in and against the
contemporary art museum by utilizing alien bodies, effects, and mixed media acts. Rather
than an inherently negative occupational hazard, alien existence and alienation instead
should be considered as generative sites for creative existence and survival. In fact,
projection into objecthood through the process of becoming art is a vital strategy—as
McMillan puts it, “indeed alienation has its uses,” uses O’Grady and Fusco exploit in
their subversive decolonization of both notions of the avant-garde and American
performance genealogies.

86
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. 1st edition. (Boston, MA: South End
Press, 1992), 115.

170
O’Grady’s practice in particular challenges the marginalization of women
identified artists of color and their artistic interventions. MBN and Art Is… also challenge
and recalibrate art world understandings of feminist art, and the disavowal of non-white
artists as participating in the initiation of the history and production of the avant-garde.
Performance art and the art of performance, thus, must continually be rewritten prior to
its art world historiography of a limited white and male dominated cannon. It must come
to terms with its alien avant-garde.

171
CHAPTER FOUR: Astride the Lens: Radical Self-Staged Portraiture

I first picked up a Nikon N70 black and white film camera in 2005, when I was a
senior in high school. Knowing I needed to fulfill an extra elective and that I had already
taken all of the painting and drawing classes offered, one of my art teachers had
recommended Photography I. As I embark on the final chapter of my dissertation, I look
back on my first experiences holding that camera system and only now realize its life
changing effects. At the time, in fulfillment of one of our first assignments, I chose to
stand in the bathroom mirror holding the viewfinder to my face. I remember waiting for a
long time, staring through that narrow space at my body, an image I thought I knew so
well, come to life afresh in front of my newly trained gaze. I pushed the shutter release.
Partially hidden behind the bulk of the camera body, I took my first self-portrait. Almost
35 years earlier, in the summer of 1971, a 23-year-old Adrian Piper stood in a dark room
holding a small 35 mm film camera to her bare flesh, and snapped a series of hazy self-
portraits in front of a large floor mirror. Largely recognized as some of the very first nude
self-portraits made by an African American woman, the series became known and
exhibited as Food for the Spirit (FIG. 20).
In this series of images, discussed in more depth later in this chapter, the artist
captures her body in various stages of undress as part of her intensive meditations on
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. These self-portraits represent a critical
moment in Piper’s experimental self-theorizing of Kant’s text—theory I argue she does in
her body through the act of capturing her reflected image. I hardly liken my own self-
exploratory and experimental self-portraits to those of Piper’s, as hers were intentionally
172
part of a rigorous study which included both meditation and fasting; however, I am
curious about the impulse to use the technology of photography to both capture and
theorize one’s own body in new ways. What is it about portraiture, specifically the self-
made portraits of women identified artists of color, that speak to larger issues of
presence—being present—in particular spaces of aesthetic appreciation? What are these
bodies saying? What space do they claim?
Richard Powell argues in Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, “that a
significant segment of black portraiture stands apart from the rest of the genre, and not
only because of the historical and social realities of racism.”
1
Rather, Powell states, “the
difference often lies in the artistic contract between the portrayer and the portrayed:
conscious or unconscious negotiations that invest black subjects with social capital.”
2
I
understand self-portraiture staged by women identified artists of color to stand apart from
the genre in similar ways, and in this chapter, I explore the enlivened position of self-
identified women of color entering into these negotiations with themselves as both the
ones who sit for portraits and the ones who construct their own visual articulations.
Powell links a portrait subject’s sense of self—“an awareness that […] self-adornment,
self-composure, and self-imagining upsets the representation paradigm and creates
something pictorially exceptional”—to photographic projections that translate the body
through the creative mechanisms and technologies of photography. I understand
“pictorially exceptional” to be rooted in the direct address strategies these women have
developed in the radical praxis of speaking out of turn. What is exceptional is the way the
artists in this chapter have, in ways similar to their other works, created visual space and

1
Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. (Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 2009), xy.
2
Ibid.
173
time for their bodies to exist within contemporary art contexts. This is accomplished
through the wielding of both their bodies and their visual art practices, which become
slippery and intertwined, transforming into a powerful tool for implicating viewers and
art world participants.
The process of self-portraiture—staging the representation of one’s own body—is
an important artistic practice to explore and analyze because of the ways artists are taking
up space, and speaking out of turn. In this chapter, I examine the self-portraiture of Piper
and Weems in order to assess the ways in which they use self-portraiture as a direct
address strategy. I conclude the chapter with a brief look into the work of emerging artists
Delphine Dia Diallo and Zanele Muholi in order to project these strategies and their
theoretical potencies into the future of the practice. In the introduction, I outlined the
ways I am thinking about speech and the radical presence that undergirds visual art
objects as a political technology in ways similar to Chela Sandovalnin Methodology of
the Oppressed (2000). If speaking out of turn can be understood in the Sandovalian sense
as a methodology of oppressed or marginalized individuals and communities, I maintain
that direct address becomes part of speaking out of turn’s technological repertoire. Direct
address is a technology necessary for generating a dissident and coalitional
cosmopolitics, and for revealing the rhetorical structures by which the languages of
aesthetic supremacy are uttered, rationalized, and ruptured.
3
Perhaps unconventionally, I
include self-staged imagery, particularly imagery produced out of conditions of historical

3
Chela Sandoval. Methodologies of the Oppressed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), 3.
174
suppression, in this repertoire.
4
Moreover, this dissertation has sought to hone the
analytic richness the sonic provides, and utilize speech and voice to assess visual art that
may or may not incorporate actual sound. In this way, this chapter is less concerned with
what voice sounds like in these self-staged images, but deeply invested in what voice
looks like.
Historically, the act of self-portraiture is particularly meaningful to artists of color
precisely because it has proven an important means of psychic negotiation, amendment,
and intervention within dehumanizing and negating visual registers. In this chapter I
introduce my own concept of artists existing astride the lens, which seeks to address the
labor involved in staging the self for visual capture. Astride the lens represents a moment
when artists move and exist in the space on either side of the camera. This existence is
complex, opening up a liberatory potential for pleasure, visual play, and the intellectual
and aesthetic transcendence of Eurocentric valuations.
5
I recognize that this mode of
visual production potentially reinscribes fraught politics of the voyeuristic gaze, and
opens bodies up to continued sexual violence.
6
However, direct address self-staged
imagery, or what I am calling radical self-portraiture goes beyond the study and taking

4
Amelia Jones discusses similar kinds of images in Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and
the Contemporary Subject (2006). Inspired by Jones’ work, I include self-portraits in my analysis
of direct address art.
5
The ways in which “aesthetics” comes to mean and have measurable economic, social, and
cultural value has been written about extensively. Historically, figures such as Immanuel Kant
(“Critique of Judgment,” 1970), Max Weber (“Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904-5),
Clive Bell (“The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” 1914), and Hans Hofmann (“On the Aims of Art, 1931)
to cite just a few. More contemporary work on aesthetics includes (but not limited to) Terry
Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990), Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard, ed.
(Aesthetics, 1997), Hal Foster, ed. (The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 1983),
Emory Elliot and Lou Freitas Caton (Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, 2002), and Peter Kivy, ed.
(The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004).
6
Laura Mulvey in her canonical 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” instructs
and provides caution regarding the gaze. Albeit limiting in her static female subject and active
male spectator, any attempts to disassemble and reassemble structures of viewing must be
mindful of possibly reifying objectification as a central mechanism for engagement.
175
of one’s likeness—a common exercise in the fine arts.
7
Rather, these portraits specifically
carry out strategic deployments of “out of turn” presence, which in turn disrupt the
spectator experience of contemporary art. Both radical self-staged portraiture and the
practice of operating (and theorizing) astride the lens help to conceptualize one another.
The art in this chapter enables me to think through the extent to which existing astride the
lens results in radical or direct address portraits, as well as, on the flip side, the degree to
which these kinds of portraits are reliant on artists’ laboring and theorizing astride the
lens. My method in many ways mirrors the labors of the self-portraits in this study.
8

The portraits in this study also often play on spectator insecurities about race,
gender, and in particular, the staged (and in many ways exposed) nature of the artists
represented. These portraits extend beyond the representation debates and revisions that
came into sharp focus during the Harlem Renaissance to rigorously theorize the methods
and the tools through which the images are often produced (photography in particular).
Thus, it is the process of radical self-portraiture, that is, the labor through which these
images come into existence in a way that confronts (or directly addresses) their viewers
that makes them unique to other self-portrait practices. For example, Weems employs
astride the lens labor in her meticulously staged radical 1990 self-portraits from her now
well-known Kitchen Table Series, where the artist physically moves from the position of
the photographer to the subject on display between shutter releases. Identifying and

7
Said another way, a direct address image can be understood as one that confronts the viewer—a
portrait that in wielding photography’s technologies—exists out of turn, out of order, or perhaps
out of sync with conventional portraiture.
8
My interdisciplinary methods have been consistent throughout the dissertation; however, this
chapter in particular has allowed for a reflexive praxis that is equally driven by my photographic
practice. In past research, I have used photography in order to document and record the subjects
and objects of my studies. In this chapter, the research in-situ alongside phenomenological
observations allowed for the creative capturing of my own image as a spectator in close proximity
to each body of work.
176
defining this particular practice is a starting point necessary for theorizing how the artist’s
physical labor of working “double duty” across modes of creative production shapes and
informs what spectators see and know about her as a subject. It is a method and theory
imagined by what can be said by, and what can be read through, the self-staged body on
display (as art object). A radical or direct address portrait is necessarily concerned with
the notion of language, and while I have focused on speech as an anchoring mode of
communication throughout, Chapter 2, 3, and 4 examine how language is expressed
through art via text and/or through the body.
9

Finally, I connect this discussion to previous conversations in Chapters 1-3 about
the possibility for reading art objects as surrogates for the artist themselves, and how we
might understand the strategy of direct address when the artist positions her own body’s
image to do the work of communicating sans the physical performance of her voice or
embodied presence. In many ways, these images outlast the possibilities and lives of
physical performances and have the potential to speak endlessly in the place of continual
presence or exhaustive labor of artists’ physical bodies. Thus, I pose the question of how
astride the lens labor might be understood as an act of self-theorizing and self-
conservation in the practice of speaking out of turn—an upfront investment in future acts
that inevitably take place through the afterlife of the artists’ portraits on visual display.
That is, the labor performed as part of the initial act of self-constitution in front of and
behind the camera’s lens thus outlives the performative moment in print by being framed
and hung in within gallery contexts. For me, radical self-portraiture is an amalgamation
of the central modes of direct address outlined in the proceeding chapters as the artists

9
While not explicitly quoted, several essays from Amelia Jones’ co-edited book Performing the
Body/Performing the Text (1999) inform my argument here as they did my analysis in Chapter 2.
177
incorporate a broad range of communicative devices such as speech/vocality,
literature/text, and bodily/performance, which are all represented in the self-portraits
included here. Or, as Anne Cheng might understand it, as occurring on the skin (or
surface) of the images themselves. This is a surface Alessandra Raengo has identified as
a repository for value—“face value.”
10

Piper, Weems, Diallo and Muholi explore and then exert the spectacle of their
bodies through the photographic image. In doing so, they move beyond the important
histories of representation that claim these bodies as “worthy,” “beautiful,” and/or
meriting aesthetic appreciation.
11
Rather, what is specific to these artists’ work is their
direct (and often confrontational) engagements with their audiences, and the unique
histories of looking and listening from which they borrow and theorize in order to stage
these engagements. Powell describes these tendencies (or, as I argue, strategies) of art as
always already functioning “as a vehicle for communicating the ‘rhetoric of the body.’”
12

Thus, this chapter makes a critical return to phenomenology and its potential for
analyzing visual art, as Powell so eloquently states:
...phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s portrait of the philosopher as an
“embodied consciousness,” open to embracing and understanding things through
the instruments of his/her own body and those of other bodies already present in
the world. I ascribe these same philosophical attributes to visual artists, the human
subjects of art, and audiences, all of whom—as investors, exemplars, and

10
See Anne Cheng on Josephine Baker (Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface
2010), and Alessandra Raengo On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value, 2013.
11
Here I am referring to the many campaigns initiated during the Harlem Renaissance through
photography, many of which paved the way for early social movement photography into the
1960s. Other radical assertions that “black is beautiful” followed during the Black Power Period
campaigns. Each moment and its predecessors inspired some of the earliest publications on
African American Art and its history.
12
Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure, xy.
178
examiners, interchangeably—are consumed with “the unique occupation of
floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside.
13

Inspired by this work, I “emphasize the ideological nature of subject-specific art and the
centrality of gender, race, ethnicity, and cultural identity,” specifically when the portrait’s
subject is the artist herself. I move away from the history and practice in art of the self-
portrait to consider the radical nature of these women’s bodies existing astride the lens of
their photographic devices. Here, Powell’s “cutting a figure” provides a useful point of
departure for situating the labor I argue these women artists perform “astride the lens,”
which always already connotes a splitting, a cut, a division of the self across time, space,
and medium.
In my formulation, any number of visual artists can be understood as practicing
and theorizing astride the lens—it is a thoughtful way of existing across the means of
production that does not solely reply on one’s racial or gender constitution. It becomes
unclear if this is the case for “cutting a figure” in Powell’s work. As discussed in my
introduction, the decision to exclusively take up the work of women identified artists of
color is a political one. However, to be clear, these specific artists and their work is what
inspired the analytic hook for the dissertation—speaking out of turn—and encounters
with their creative praxis directly led to astride the lens as a way to discuss the division of
the self across time, space, and medium, and more specifically, the labor that this process
entails. Their artwork inspires and informs this larger theoretical contribution. In this
chapter, I employ their work towards another function as well, and that is to identify and
analyze if and how a particular self-portrait practice, form, or strategy can produce a
radical self-portrait.

13
Ibid.
179
A radical self-staged portrait is one that is speaks and exists out of turn, as an
extension of the artist’ political subjectivity. As stressed throughout the dissertation, the
methodology of speaking out of turn emerges out of a condition of violent silencing and
erasure that takes place through the hegemonic structures of cultural production. Silence
and erasure is managed when bodies register visually as being out a turn, without space to
exist within white heteropatriarchal systems of expression and artistic valuation. The self-
staged portrait, alongside other sites of creative enactment, can produce a visual
intervention, a rupture. The sonic implications of speaking out of turn, interrupting,
and/or disrupting by way of inserting one’s voice where it does not belong, reveal that the
sonic and the visual are inexplicably intertwined at the sites (particularly within the art
world) where the marginalization of women-identified artists of color occurs at the
intersection of voice and presence.
Radical self-portraits are articulated in their most salient forms, again for me,
through the creative practice of women of color artists—who I have identified throughout
the dissertation as a group of the most silenced and invisible creative laborers in the fine
art world. What makes a particular portrait radical is its ability—through direct address
technologies—to speak and exist out of turn and against the grain of contemporary art
museums. Perhaps this opens up other ways for a self-staged portrait to be considered
radical, or profound. However, this chapter focuses on this specific strategy (direct
address), and the labor of working astride the lens as the basis for reading a particular
image as radical, causing rupture, producing a moment of profundity in the viewing
experience. In some cases, these portraits act as a surrogate for the artists’ bodies
themselves, and in other cases the artists wield text, collage, and other stylistic
180
mechanisms to produce these disruptive portraits. However, rather than the subversive
elements or attributes based largely on the act of posturing, which Powell assigns the
works in Cutting a Figure, radical self-portraiture is reliant on astride the lens labor and
its relationship to the spectator.
14
And while posing makes up a significant portion of that
creative labor, focusing solely on posing leaves out the work (and frankly, visual
theorizing) the artists perform as photographers as well. Subversive elements may be
identifiable in the portraits presented here, but I focus instead on their unique ability to
create a space that allows bodies that have been particularly singled out, silenced, and
rendered invisible to come into focus.

Astride the Lens: A Theoretical Framework
Astride the lens intentionally connotes sexualized pleasure and play while
theorizing how the physical labor of the artists working “double duty” across modes of
creative production shapes and informs what we see and what we know of them as
subjects through their direct address art. This seeing and knowing is further punctuated
by what Amelia Jones terms identification. According to Jones, “[w]e attach to or repel
ourselves from images (and bodies in general) through complex and shifting circuits of

14
One of the largest critiques of Powell’s work stems from an approach that “hinges of his ability
to convince the reader that there is indeed such a thing as “cutting a figure,” which he defines in
part as a sense of “sharpness” that is a specifically “black American-informed artistic strategy of
modern style” (7)” (Quote from CAA Review conducted by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw) Powell
also suggests that “cutting a figure” is about posing, exhibitionism, and pride, which is often
found in “anatomical distortion, emblematic posturing, and a contrastive decorative scheme” (10).
Along with DuBois Shaw, this is what I note to be the limiting allocation onto works based solely
on a kind of aesthetics of posturing.
181
identification and disidentification.”
15
This process of both attachment and repulsion
might be considered, as Jones does, in relation to Rosi Braidotti’s “radical relationality,”
a method that also exemplifies astride the lens labor.
16
Said another way, I understand
astride the lens labor and theorizing as constituting a process of radical relationality to the
self. Furthermore, reading Jones’ argument in the same context that certain creative
enactments of the female sex (in particular) look back, I argue that they might also
certainly talk back. That is, these enactments which enter into a radical relationality
between the artist as herself and her own subject, and the spectator, engaging in both
looking and speaking out against the purported possibilities for their doing so in the
context of the contemporary art museum. Thus, astride the lens is also an articulation of
the female sex (in particular) claiming representative agency through the still image,
which takes up space and ruptures time, and, according to Jones’ own theorizing, presents
another possible form of durational existence.
A distinct practice emergerd during the feminist artistic moments of the 1970s
through the 1990s, in which white woman began to explore the hyper-sexualized
existence of the female body throughout art historical discourse and on display in popular
culture.
17
In contrast, the appearance of the black female nude in the 1960s and 1970s

15
Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. 1
edition. (Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York: Routledge, 2012), 170.
16
As discussed by Jones, “Braidotti introduces the notion of radical relationality to insist on the
possibility of engaging this relationality ethically: “the ethnical ideal [with radical relationality] is
to increase one’s ability to enter into modes of relation with multiple others.” (Jones citing
Braidotti, 170-172)
17
Many of this work (scholarly and artistic) was in direct response to Mulvey’s limiting
conceptions of the gaze in the mid-1970s—feminist artists and scholars reanimate explorations of
the hypersexualized female body, particularly through new and exciting articulations of the
female nude in feminist art. Some of this illuminating scholarship includes but is not limited to:
Mary Kelly. Imaging Desire. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996).
Lucy Lippard. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. E.P. Dutton, 1976.
Amelia Jones, ed. The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, 2003
182
was often objectifying and pornographic in nature. White women, in particular, find
themselves in the privileged position within the art world to explore the female nude,
female sexuality, sexual agency, and the desublimation that which occurs in both feminist
and abject art practices of the time. Women of color, on the other hand, are already
subject to racialized sexualizing discourses, which produce limits on their public creative
experimentations. Lorraine O’Grady writes in 1992 about the deeply entrenched effects
of colonization on non-white women’s bodies, “[bodies] that ha[ve] been raped, maimed,
murdered….”
18
Alongside O’Grady, I am interested in a moment of “reclamation of the
body as a site of black female subjectivity” and sexual possibility—a moment of breaking
free (even if only momentarily) from histories of sexual violence and the strictures of
respectability politics. My conception of artists existing astride the lens captures this
moment—the splitting of the body’s labor—when the dual role on either side of the
camera becomes part of the reclamation process.
Sexuality—sexualized pleasure and play—within one’s creative output thus also
becomes an important component of women of color artistic work during this time
period, although it is often more subliminal or imbedded within their practice. It is with
Adrian Piper’s Food for Thought that we start to see images of the black female body
made by a black woman as an act of self-theorizing and auto-expression. These images
are the first radical self-portraits by a black woman artist to be displayed in contemporary
art contexts. I conceive astride the lens as a theoretical concept that might get us closer to
understanding and analyzing the ways in which these women, despite their violent

18
Lorraine O’Grady. “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” Afterimage,
(1992), 14-25.

183
distortion in popular culture and erasure in art historical discourse, experimented with the
sexual implications of their creative work and the potential pleasure experienced in the
act of self-capture and self-spectacularization.
19

In order to perform close readings of such portraits, I rely on several theoretical
concepts to build my analysis. First, I use the notion of the gaze and the gaze of the self-
fetish—or fetishized self.
20
Anne Cheng is instructive on the power dynamics assumed in
being looked at, and the dual pleasure in the spectacularization of self.
21
That is, the
pleasure of being on display, and the pleasure of looking at others looking at the self on
display. Taking up biracial actor Nancy Kwan’s performance in the film Flower Drum
Song, Cheng unpacks the power and political dynamics of “the gaze” and further
complicates multifaceted layers of looking and seeing oneself through the eyes, mirrors,

19
I am also thinking about the act of self-capture in conversation with Hortense Spillers’s
canonical essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” which provides a foundational way of invoking
and theorizing the surface of the body, the skin, as a metric for what is means to be human. In her
essay, Spillers discusses the black body as a body of symbolic capture (“the captive body”),
which describes a body locked in a new symbolic order (“the American grammar of race”) with
divergent gender and social norms than the diasporic homeland. I am suggesting in dialogue with
Spillers that despite the status of an artists’ body as a “captive body,” there may in fact be
pleasure experienced in the act of self-capture (perhaps for that very reason)—particularly in the
reproduction and amplification of the black captive body. Perhaps it is the technology of the
camera through astride the lens labor and self-theorizing that allows for a rupture in the symbolic
order of the American grammar of modernity that Spillers points us towards.
20
Much scholarly work has been done on both the gaze and conceptions of “the fetish.” The gaze
itself has a much longer history than what is sited here. However, my understanding of self-fetish
through discourses of the gaze is directly influenced by and in conversation with the work listed.
Work that interrogates (and historicizes) notions of “the fetish,” but also presenting the self-as-
fetish is most useful in the context of this chapter and for my thinking. This literature includes:
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927). Joan Riviere, tr. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New
York: Macmillan, 1963).
Kaja Silverman, “Suture,” in Subject of Semiotics (1984).
Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Maplethorpe,” (1986), in
Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1993)
Amelia Jones, “The Contemporary Artist as Commodity Fetish,” in Art Becomes You (2004),
132.
Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
21
Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 53.
184
and the cameras of others. I bring up Cheng’s performance-driven analysis here in order
to argue that the three-way mirror mechanism, as Cheng discusses in one particularly
compelling scene with Kwan, is an integral part of the practice of radical self-portraiture.
The three-way mirror produces a unique position for the performer to look at being-
looked-at-ness.
22
That is, the artist (through the technological mirroring of the camera) is
able to look at herself looking at herself as a mode of critical inquiry. The portrait that is
produced from this type of study allows another possibility of the artist looking on as
spectators examine the self-image. Both the camera lens and the final portrait object act
as mirrors.
The mirror is a helpful device through which to understand both the gaze and the
act of looking, as well as how the self may become a particular self-reflexive
object/subject. For Kwan in the three-way-mirror scene and Cheng in her analysis, the act
of watching spectators watch the body one inhabits is of central interest. The mirror in
Kwan’s case, or the self-portrait in my own argument here, represents “not just how I see
myself, or how others see me, but how I see others seeing me.”
23
This third point of view
turns the performance of the self-portrait photo shoot into scenes of multiplication and
plenitude as images of the body—of the performance—become mass produced, widely
distributed, or reappear multiple times. This multiplication of the body, as well as its

22
This is active position of “looking at being-looked-at-ness” can be found in Elin Diamond’s
1992 book, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, as well as a earlier discussion
in the introduction of this dissertation.
23
Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 53.
Also, while this chapter does not address psychoanalytic theory directly, Jacques Lacan’s essay
“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience,” published in his book Écritis (1966) has been on my radar for some time and
exemplifies the importance of the mirror in processes of subject formation and visual self-
articulation.

185
repetition in these scenarios, is constructed (and perhaps instructed) through varying
attire, accouterments, and often even completely new identities.
I also emphasize transformation, specifically the labor of that transformation,
which Cheng addresses with regard to Nancy Kwan. Identity flexibility gives the artist
object/subjects the ability to transform themselves into “other othernesses” that move
beyond public appetites and fascination with the exotic, providing something more, an
excess of striking and alien possibilities. What Cheng describes in her analysis as racial
changeability, as that which “gives the sense that you are always getting something other
than what you see,”
24
I understand as being integral to existing out of turn and to
constructing the self as curio.
25
That is, women identified artists of color stage their own
bodies as rare object/subjects through the complex and multilayered mechanisms of
speaking out of turn, which is a task (as we have seen) that also requires a degree of
shape-shifting as the artist offers her own body for visual fascination.
Beyond the gaze, I also focus on the object of the mirror itself, and its
surrounding cultural significance, specifically within the field of psychoanalysis. Franz
Fanon poses crucial questions about the racialized fragmentation of black bodies,
specifically. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon addresses the “mirror-stage” as a racial
parable, calling the black-white relationship “narcissistic,” suggesting that if the ideal
racial/social mirror reflects the image of idealized white-ness, then “blackness” can only
become an abhorrent, even obscene, visual image.
26
Fanon continues to discuss the

24
Ibid.
25
The “curio” has a fascinating relationship to art and material cultural history. By definition, a
curio is an unusual or rare object that is characterized by its potential to delight and/or intrigue.
They are objects that are often displayed for the sheer purpose of looking, and are valued as a
curiosity and perhaps by their ability to spark wonder.
26
Franz Fanon (1952).
186
traumatizing experience of seeing himself through the white gaze and the multiple and
fragmented deformations and distortions his body undertakes. I use Fanon’s experience to
ponder how the appearance of the artists’ bodies may cause slippages in the distortions
and deformations he discusses, specifically through the how, or the methods through
which, their bodies enter the mirror and perhaps displace the gaze. This can been seen in
my later discussion of Muholi’s “Bona” (Charlottesville, Virginia, 2015) (FIG. 24),
which is a self-portrait of the artist reclining on a bed holding a large round mirror. It is
unclear from the angle of the mirror whether Muholi’s gaze finds the viewer or her own
body through the mirror’s surface. Both the mirror and the camera provide occasions for
strategic multiplicity for the artists, rather than for the viewers, to remain in perpetual
fragmentation, as Fanon suggests. This narcissistic moment—of radical and excessive
self-love and self-multiplication—opens up possibilities for a rupture in the power
dynamics embedded within histories and practices of spectatorship. Furthermore, I, along
with Cheng, Monica L. Miller, and Daphne Brooks, argue that even beyond increased
agency, there is also pleasure in self-spectacularization and in changeability.
Finally, I return again to phenomenology as a critical framework for examining
audience engagement (specifically my own) with works that stage communion between
the artist, their own image, and their audiences. If gazing practices are disrupted through
the creative labor of these artists, then ethnographic phenomenology (in this case) is
uniquely well suited for exploring the visual affects of the gaze, mirrors, and the self as
art object exhibited in the contemporary art museum. Similar to methods employed in my
first chapter, I make my own labor (research in-situ, encountering objects, making
photographs, and writing a dissertation) visible as something that also occurs “astride the
187
lens,” or perhaps better situated, “astride the dissertation.” Perhaps dissertations
performed in this way might also be considered another form of radical self-portrait—no
doubt a query for another day.
27

The Theory Done in this Body
After that first bathroom photo shoot, not totally unlike the profusion of images
being produced in bathroom mirrors in the current age of “the selfie,” that old N70 could
not snap pictures fast enough. The shutter opening and closing as I would shift my
weight, turn, and from every angle, shift and pose again. I enjoyed the eerie anonymity of
my faceless body, the camera lens quite literally taking the place of my eyes. Several
days after these images were taken, I entered the darkroom for the first time, and until
entering graduate school, hardly left. There was a magical and powerfully seductive
quality to standing in total darkness, manipulating light and producing images from its
absence. A new passion was birthed in me through the tips of my fingers dipping in and
out of chemical trays. This dark space quickly became a place of healing, self-reflection,
and self-creation with each chemical baptism.

Exposure
In the summer of 1971, Piper experienced another kind of baptism—an embodied
spiritual rite. Her days filled by practicing yoga in solitude, fasting, and studying Kant,

27
Auto-ethnographic methodologies have been writing and refining this process for decades.
Specifically, the work of American anthropologist Dorinne Kondo is exemplary for the ways in
which Kondo, as a researcher and theatre practitioner, navigates and negotiates the spaces (and
individuals) she encounters in her work. Often revealing the complicated and complex labor
involved in doing research (particular embodied research), Kondo makes visible the
performance(s) involved in writing and theorizing in and through the body.
188
the artist is said to have experienced a state of transcendence as the image series Food for
Thought emerged. Staging her reflected image for photographic capture, Piper confirmed
her own self-presence with “the ‘reality check’ in the mirror” in her New York apartment
studio.
28
The artist would use both audio recording of herself reading Kant and the self-
portraits to combat moments when she doubted her material existence. Through this
process of making herself an object through which theory is meditated, Piper was able to
withdraw from the text whenever she felt too involved.
29
What is it about these self-
staged portraits that speak of the “intellectual pleasures” of existing astride the lens—the
labor of self-exploration and self-study and the pleasure of theory done in the body?
30

And how are these theories and pleasures transmitted?
In many ways, Piper performs her own phenomenological experiment through her
“private loft performance,” as she interrogates the structures of consciousness through
rigorous study, specifically she approaches Kant’s text from a first-person point of
view.
31
Piper is directed toward Kant’s text, and her experiences of this object—of his
theory—offer something new. That is, John Bowles asserts, “Piper performs “the ‘reality
check’ in the mirror” as a crisis of Kantian subjectivity: how can the social subject Kant
describes in his text attain transcendental rationality and truth?”
32
Both Judith Butler and
Ronald Judy acknowledge similar paradoxes within Kant’s text, mobilizing both feminist

28
Adrian Piper. “Food for the Spirit,” in “Point Out,” edited by Paul McCarthy. High
Performance 4, No. 1; 13 (Spring 1981), 34.
29
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address,” in Adrian Piper:
Race, Gender, and Embodiment. (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2011), 205.
30
Here I am using “intellectual pleasure” as inspired by John Bowles use regarding Piper’s work
(Bowles 205).
31
Piper is the one who designated this series as a “private loft performance” in a brief,
unpublished introductory statement that she inserted into the notebook in the 1980s. This phrase
was first published in the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Alternative Museum in
1987. Alternative Museum, Adrian Piper, 13 (Bowles on Piper, 290).
32
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being…”, 206.
189
critique and critical race theorizing to pose challenges to Kant’s universalist project—a
project that particularly negates both women and non-white European subjects.
33

Ultimately, Kant’s perception of both poses a crisis for transcendence, and these critiques
create space for women and people of color to, as Bowles observes, “perform their
exclusion from metaphysical discourse as a way of exposing and historicizing the silence
it requires of them.”
34
It is the silence that I have been most concerned with—and how
artists create voice in the face of that silence. Furthermore, if silence were required, then
any act of vocal projection would thus be out of turn.
In Piper’s case, the artist performs her exclusion, as a black woman, from both
theories of the metaphysical and art historical discourse. These performances—alien and
excluded—work against the silence and invisibility both projects require of her. In this
rigorous study of Kant, the artist mobilizes the self-portrait to claim visual space—to
stake claims on her material existence. While she so fervently seeks to capture in her
audio recordings and her mirror self-portraits some residual bodily presence of her
transformed self-conscious, the artist produced time and space for this embodied self to
exist. Assuming the content (notes, recordings, and self-portraits) of this “private loft
performance” was never meant to be exhibited in public, what then is the spectator’s
experience of Food for Thought, and how does Piper’s experience of being astride the
lens communicate (or fail to communicate) the theories through her body? Thus, “[t]he
subject might be aware that behavior is governed by norms without knowing precisely

33
Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler,
Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 11-43. (London: Verso, 2000), 23-24.
Ronald Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the
Vernacular. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 99-148.
34
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being…”, 206.
190
how. Piper’s photographs initiate a process that makes this apparent, to a point.”
35

Bowles poses the question another way: How might Piper’s exploration of her own
consciousness initiate a process by which viewers will learn about the norms they find
themselves invested in?”
36

I walked into the new Whitney Museum of Art quite unaware of what I would
encounter. Not having done the requisite research, I only knew that the exhibition
America is Hard to See would contain works of interest, however, it was a surprise to
find Food for the Spirit hung in one of the fifth floor galleries. I was with a friend, so I
was unable to stage my usual gallery hangout. However, encountering the work in this
way—by surprise—gave rise to a new experience (less calculated) and a different
reading. Having previously read Bowles and several articles of Piper’s, I was still
unprepared for my encounter with the 14 framed silver gelatin prints hanging in that
room. Food for the Spirit was included in the exhibition section, “Learn Where the Meat
Comes From,” and took up space with the work of Howardena Pindell, Martha Rosler,
Ulysses Jenkins, Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Cindy Sherman, and Hannah Wilke.
Piper’s photographic images are often presented encased in shiny glass and under
hot lights, which sharply reflects the likeness of her audience members over those same
images. I had to look through my own image in order to see Piper—to view the work.
Some may argue that this is a common phenomenon, where museum displays must—in a
very practical way—protect images (thus the heavy glass) and that light may
coincidentally cause reflections and shadows in the artworks’ frames (or on the artworks
themselves). And I agree that “these things happen,” and that such phenomena are

35
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being…”, 209.
36
Ibid.
191
ingrained in the viewing experiences in any number of museums. However, here I want
to draw attention to the strategic way Piper has exploited such a quotidian phenomenon in
order to draw attention toward practices of looking while also making the performance of
viewing contemporary art a central component to her own work.
This strategy is most apparent in the aforementioned work Aspects of the Liberal
Dilemma.
37
Another direct address phenomenological experiment, this piece, like Food
for Thought, demands a kind of introspection from its viewers. Having seen the latter
prior to my Whitney encounter with the former, my experience of it inevitably shaped the
other. As I found in my experience with Cornered, the steady voice of Piper lilting in the
background of museum galleries is not easily forgotten. That is, of course, if one chooses
to listen in the first place. Her voice remains inside my head when I view her work, and
indeed, contemporary art in general. Standing in front of each of her Food for Thought
self-portraits, I heard her voice once more, “I’m black…” and “[y]ou want to have an
aesthetic experience: to be fulfilled…” “You are probably black…What are you going to
do about it?”
38

I stood there staring at her, through my own reflection, moving between each of
the hazy images. Piper’s body appeared, disappeared, and reappeared as my own body
moved from portrait to portrait—and my eyes squinted as Piper’s 1971 documentation of
her material existence was evidenced before them. The artist stood in various stages of
undress, including several images of her fully clothed. This was something of a shock, as

37
Discussed in the introduction of the dissertation, Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978) uses
direct address audio installation to capture museumgoers in the act of spectatorship, which Piper
frames as an act of visual trespass.
38
The quotes within this mash up are pulled directly from the audio of both of Piper’s previously
discussed works, Cornered (1988) and Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978). For more
discussion on these pieces see the “Introduction,” and “Chapter One: On Turning.”
192
I had assumed the series was summed up in the few nude images I had seen previously—
the same one or two shots used in every art book or publication that mentioned the piece.
Part of my interpretation of this work, following Bowles’ lead, requires a reading of Food
for the Spirit as “Piper’s critical engagement with the discursive figure of her silence,”
which requires examining not only how the piece gives “new form to the repressed figure
of black women’s sexuality but also how the privacy Piper maintains about it reveals and
reiterates certain societal expectations of discretion and respectability.”
39
Thus, my
interpretation is multifaceted. On the one hand Piper’s self-staged presence breaks the
silence (and invisibility) required of the black female body in the art world. This is a
presence directly mediated—reiterated—by the viewer as she steps under the hot lights
and adjusts her own frame in order to see Piper more clearly through her own reflection.
The viewer is implicated in Piper’s breaking of silence. On the other hand, the formal
distinctions between the nude portraits, the semi-nude, and fully clothed images is
another meaningful way to understand both the visual play the artist engages regarding
her own sexual materiality and the already excessive—too much, too exposed—non-
white body that forbids the same kind of extreme flaunting of the female form afforded to
white feminist artists (and always white males) during this time.
When I first viewed these images at the Whitney, Piper’s self-staged images
moved beyond their hazy silence—transcended discretion and respectability—to speak
and theorize through out of turn presence and an embodied rebellion against Kantian
conceptions of the self. Piper spoke of these things through the flesh of her brown body—
a body historically marked by both rebellion and theoretical action against the negation it

39
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being…”, 207.
193
has endured. Significantly, Food for the Spirit does not offer answers to the questions it
intentionally poses of Kant, and perhaps unintentionally poses of the museum. Instead, it
presents Piper’s claims to both the space of the museum and Kantian rationality in the
form of a question, one that is distilled in Bowles’ analysis of the work.
If, in 1971, cultural norms silenced any black woman who made a claim to
universality, then Piper performed a critical reiteration of the conventions of
metaphysical philosophy by claiming the ability to inhabit the transcendence
Kant’s text promises. This is precisely the form Butler has since imaged a
feminist, queer, or “post-colonialist” critique of rationality must take. By
acknowledging norms of gender, race, and metaphysical philosophy, Piper
simultaneously lays claim to universality while critiquing and historicizing its
traditionally imperfect application.
40

If theory can be understood as being performed in and through the body, it is important to
consider how Piper’s body is displayed, what is documented by this display, and what the
display enables or compels in our own bodily theorizing (as it were), right through the
artists’ photographic texts.
41
Pointedly, the spectator’s material existence also ebbs and
flows in the space of the Whitney museum. It exists among and in relationship to other
viewers and museum workers. In the gallery where Food for Thought is displayed, the
spectator’s body fades in and out of Piper’s light and dark shrouded figure, which opens
and forecloses the possibilities of one’s own likeness to be made visible. These moments
of visibility are always fleeting and the viewer is only ever momentarily materialized in
the portrait’s frame.
I took self-portraits of my own—right through the glass of Piper’s image (FIG.
21). My body made black and white through the blurry exposures mounted on the

40
John Bowles, “The Mythic Being…”, 208.
41
Again, Kondo and other ethnographers such as Marta Savigliano and Julie Taylor, along with
visual cultural theorists such as Amelia Jones, Jennifer Doyle, and Marta Zarzycka have informed
the ways I am thinking about “bodily theorizing.”
194
Whitney gallery wall. I, like Piper, was coming in and out of focus. Her body oscillated
between frames, shifting with the exposure of each study—an exercise that was
reminiscent of my own body moving back and forth, hovering over black and white
images in dark room trays. As the images faded in and out according to the light, my own
body’s exposure reminded me of Piper’s in that gallery. It is no coincidence that in these
spaces, which seem to engulf/consume the black and female body, Piper’s grasp at
universality is dependent on the technology of the camera (said to be a democratizing tool
since its mass production), as she captures her self image as a test of her material
existence. A moment, in the hot and hazy New York studio, and then again in the bright
and ostentatious space of the Whitney, that some might acknowledge as one of
transcendence.
I capture myself in Piper’s image—in order to hold myself in space and time as I
am—black and woman. Perhaps, my own brief ethnographic and creative labor can be
understood as performed in duality, in splitting, and on either side of cameras, academic
spaces, and here and now as I sit drafting a few thoughts, which materialize my own
theorizing on art against the grain. Like Piper alone in that small room, I am in constant
fear of disappearing—of losing myself to tasks and environs resistive to my embodied
theorizing, to my presence and my voice. I turned toward Piper in the Whitney museum
this summer, and kept returning, perhaps for answers (for proof). I am no doubt directed
toward Piper—I see myself in her work. Perhaps she is directed at me. Perhaps we enter
into a staring contest of sorts—unaffected by the space/place/or time of our encounter.
195
She speaks to me; she preserves herself, as I must preserve myself and this encounter
here in this dissertation.
42

Creative Labor: Overtime and Double-duty
A woman, her skin dark mahogany, plays cards and smokes a cigarette in a glossy
frock alone at her kitchen table. Her posture is self-assured and gaze focused. The black
and white image holds stillness, a composure now closely associated with its artist,
American photographer Carrie Mae Weems. This self-staged portrait is the last in her
Kitchen Table Series (1990) (FIG.22), which includes 20 images, all featuring the artist.
However, Weems does not see these images as self-portraits. Rather, the woman in the
photographs is “a character,” Weems says, a protagonist. “I use my body as a stand-in,
but I never think of it as being about me. Rather the character helps to reveal something
that is more complicated about the lives of women.”
43
In wielding her body as a surrogate
for “all self-possessed women,” and in “controlling the narrative as both the subject and
photographer,” Weems “found her artistic voice.”
44

42
Here, I think it necessary to point to the possibilities and limitations of such an understanding
as the one I am presenting. Possibilities include: a different kind of knowing in and through the
body (the viewer’s body)—the ability to theorize through our experiencing the art as phenomena,
as occasion for a critical self-reflexivity and as an embodied epistemology. The limitations are:
reinscription of fraught practices and politics of the gaze, specifically, the idea of coming to know
oneself through an Other. In this case, the other would be Piper, specifically in the art, Piper’s
black female body (sometimes nude). Can we know Kant through Piper’s body—through her
body of work? Can we better understand/know our own material reality/existence through art,
specifically, art that is ‘out of turn’ (or speaks out)? More pointedly, can we better understand our
material existence through Piper’s images?
43
Hilary Moss. “Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Indelible Series — Almost Three Decades
Later.” The New York Times 5 Apr. 2016. (NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Apr. 2016).
44
Sheets, Hilarie M. “Carrie Mae Weems, Photographer and Subject.” The New York Times 12
Sept. 2012. (NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Apr. 2016).

196
In this well-known series, Weems captures a black modern woman as she moves
through life’s experiences of love, loss, motherhood, community engagement, and
solitude. These iconic self-staged portraits capture creative labor as that which bleeds into
other forms of domestic labor. Weems reclaims the kitchen table as the site where the
frenzy and banality of everyday life meets the artist studio—the intermediary space
where a black woman might work overtime and astride the lens.
Astride the lens is, at its core is about labor—the dual labor the artists’ body
performs once it has been split, or as it moves across the chasms of creative expression.
In her earlier work especially, this is Weems’ practice par excellence. Astride the lens as
a methodology is about experimenting and expressing the sexual subjectivities of women
of color artists, but it is also about the physical (and creative) labor of the artworks’
production. If labor takes place on either side of camera, each side is essential for both
the theoretical scaffolding of existing astride the lens and the distinct methods deployed
in the acts of portrait sitting and photography. Modeling or portrait sitting can be
understood simply as the act or profession of someone who models. In the artist’s case, a
model is one who sits, poses, or displays her body in various ways, for a visual
representation, rendering, or imitation. The skills and logistics of shape shifting one’s
body and of self-display/modeling are actually quite demanding. The labor of standing
still, or of posing the limbs, holding positions, and creating angles for light and shadow to
move across the body requires extreme focus, patience, strength, and vision. Both Piper
and Weems, and later we will see Muholi and Diallo, shape their bodies—posing—by
negotiating space often in dialogical ways, sometimes holding props and performing
197
cultural debates in, on, and around their bodies and against historical representations of
black and brown women.
As a model (or performing body), Weems spectacularly wields her black and
feminine body, physically and emotionally shape shifting in front of her audiences as she
dines with her lover, cries, does her makeup, and reads with her children, all at her
kitchen table. Finally, the series concludes with four striking images of the artist alone.
The artist’s steady gaze confronts the viewers; her portraits come to life with words and
gaze, making the invisible visible. On the other side of the camera, Weems’ practice and
profession of photography is a different form of labor. Creative in its own way, the bulk
of today’s photographic labor takes place after the images have been staged and captured
using the technology of the camera. That said, the process of capturing the image
historically has been equally taxing, as camera bodies’ range in size and weight, and
lighting and backdrops must also be managed. Increasingly, hours are spent hunched over
chemical trays in darkrooms or with eyes glued to computer monitors in advance of any
final object. Actual dark room manipulation and photo-shop editing constitute a
significant amount of skilled labor—a task that requires, at the very least, a mastery of
light. Moreover, self-staged portrait artists including Weems cut, crop, and suture images
of their own bodies—model and portrait-sitter bodies—with their darkroom hovering,
and light-wielding bodies. Together, this body and all of its laboring accomplish a radical
self-staged portrait.
Weems’ portraits in the Kitchen Table Series do not exist on their own; lengthy
vignettes are also framed and exhibited alongside the work. The entire project was
inspired by the aforementioned writings of Laura Mulvey, particularly “Visual Pleasure
198
and Narrative Cinema” (1975), “which addressed the lack of nonobjectified
representations of women in film and other cultural expressions.”
45
The Kitchen Table
Series, like Weems’ other series Family Pictures and Stories, offered a response to
Mulvey’s work—portraits of an often disregarded subject, “in this case, a modern black
woman, ‘the other of the other.’”
46
The significance of the accompanying text lies in its
turbulent narrative, which is one of quotidian love, loss of love, motherhood, community
engagement, and solitude.
She’d been pickin em up and layin em down, moving to the next town for a while,
needing a rest, some moss under her feet, plus a solid man who enjoyed a good
fight with a brave woman. She needed a man who didn’t mind her bodacious
manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions, and her hopes were
getting slender.
47

The poetic words are thrown into relief by the interrogation-style light present in the
images, which hovers over the kitchen table, staging each scene as that which must be
examined and cross-examined carefully. Weems constructs another kind of portrait, and
as the viewer navigates the galleries of the Simon Guggenheim Museum, they encounter
a black and woman identified textual body—they enter into the dynamic multi-medium
portrait of Weems’ character. The experience of reading text and imaged bodies
alongside each other is punctuated by the labor taking place on and around Weems’
kitchen table, a place the artist captures as both a place of torment and sanctuary, and
always as a site of investigation.

45
Kathryn E. Delmez, ed. Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. (Frist
Center for the Visual Arts in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London,
2012), 76.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid. Text panel 6.2; 78.
199
This multipurpose piece of furniture and the written words produced “in its
vicinity” are phenomenologically significant.
48
As discussed in Chapter 1,
phenomenology is largely concerned with human perception in relation to objects and
spaces. Seemingly quotidian material objects (such as Weems’ kitchen table) bring this
study of consciousness (both on the part of Weems and the viewer) into greater relief.
Sara Ahmed, in her chapter, “Orientations towards Objects,” eloquently reminds us that
phenomenology has been historically linked to tables, chairs, paper, and writing desks
since its philosophical conception.
49
Specifically, Ahmed and other feminist philosophers
explore the labor that occurs on and around these quotidian objects, revealing that this
labor is gendered, and, I argue through Weems’ work, raced as well. Not only does this
radical self-staged portrait series visually and literarily speak into existence one
experience of black womanhood, but it also belongs in the lineage of canonical
philosophic pursuits which took place at desks, in chairs, and around tables. When taken
with this history, Weems’ kitchen table enables philosophical theorizing astride both the
modes of creative production and domestic labor—creative production in her
photographic and written articulations, and domestic labors of child rearing and
physically catering to a significant other. As also seen in Adrian Piper’s Cornered (1988),

48
Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971), 35.
The kitchen table also holds particular significance for black feminists in the 1980s as many
gathered their artistic, intellectual, and activist energies in domestic spaces and around kitchen
tables. In fact, the radical feminist press Kitchen Table Press (Women of Color Press) was started
in 1980 by author Barbara Smith. Two of the most popular titles include: This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.
49
In this chapter, Sara Ahmed meticulously unpacks Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of his
writing table. She goes on to use this analysis to advance her transformative arguments on
orientation(s).
200
tables can be a mechanism of protection, and when overturned, a strategy of diversion—
retreat.
Kitchen Table Series dons many publications and is most known for its striking
imagery of the black female protagonist embodying a range of subject positions and
emotions; however, very few (if any) publish the series alongside its poetic and
sometimes troubling narrative—a narrative I understand as functioning as an extension (if
not co-constitutive) of the photographic images themselves. Through this multi-modal
radical self-portrait, Weems achieves a rigorous phenomenological gesture, one that both
establishes and captures the epistemological richness of black womanhood—womanhood
the artist entangles and self implicates through the self-captured image-narrative-myth-
portrait on display.

Telling the Truth, Dealing with You
“The whole thing of turning the camera to yourself—it’s really not easy.” –Zanele
Muholi
50

The lush folds and dark circular designs of floor to ceiling curtains pour down
from the top of the frame to meet two ivory pillowcases and the soft contours of a large
bed, on which the body of South African photographer Zanele Muholi lies. This scene,
which recalls art and visual histories of women (white) reclined in plush surrounds, is not
a portrayal of sensual abandon or a study in the male (white) gaze. Rather, the portrait is
one of tension and intrigue. The image, which is titled Bona (Charlottesville) (2015)
(FIG. 23), is charged not only by the nude black body at its compositional center, but also

50
Wortham, Jenna. “Zanele Muholi’s Transformations.” The New York Times 8 Oct. 2015.
(NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Apr. 2016).

201
through that body’s active and perhaps confrontational posture. Muholi lies on her back
with arms and legs erect and supporting a large round mirror. Natural light from windows
unseen at the composition’s margins highlights the curves and contours of the artist’s
body, while also casting deep black shadows as Muholi’s hands grip the mirror’s top
edges. The artist lifts and tilts her head in critical examination—but of what, it is hard to
be sure. Does the artist side-eye her own reflection in the mirror, perhaps gazing upon her
shadowed breasts, or her intricately braided hair? Or does she cut her gaze at the viewer,
as depending on where one stands Muholi’s dark and focused gaze in the mirror halts any
unsolicited perusal of her body?
The word bona, when used in Roman and civil law, refers to “property,” real and
personal. In its Latin etymology, bona fides means “good faith,” or the absences of deceit
and/or fraud. Though I am unable to confirm the meaning behind portrait’s name at this
time, the possible meanings produced by both definitions (bona and bona fides) are
provocative placeholders. Bona, the portrait, was exhibited at Yancey Richardson Gallery
in New York as part of Muhuli’s first exhibition of self-portraits entitled, “Somnyama
Ngonyama” (“Hail, the Dark Lioness”). Naming this exhibition as an empowering
corrective to a childhood spent feeling ugly and shamed, Muholi recounts having to
overcoming these debilitating sentiments, “because nobody can love you more than
you.”
51
Thus, the title emerged as one of affirmation of strength, power, and beauty.
Before the arresting self-portraits gained international attention and visibility,
Muholi was known for documenting South Africa’s LGBTQI communities, which she
has captured and displayed in the ongoing series “Faces and Phases.” These images, as
well as the images found in her self-portrait series, are produced mainly as traditional

51
Ibid.
202
black and white silver-gelatin prints. The medium itself, renowned for its crisp lines and
the deep contrast made possible through darkroom manipulation, lends itself to the fierce
presence of Muholi’s body at the vanguard of each image. In other images from the
series, the artist dons various headdress—large and feathery plumes, a bespectacled
helmet, textured wraps, sensuously folded textiles, shiny Brillo pads, cosmetic bags, thick
wooly wigs, wooden clothes pins, and her own hair in braided crowns (FIG. 24-27). And
while the artist remains front and center in a variety of hazy background settings, the
titles of each image draws attention to the ways in which each image was staged in
transit. Complicated by place and the seemingly unimportant space of the background,
these self-staged images as a series are produced not only in transit, but also in
translation as they are set in an assortment of national contexts (Oslo, Norway; Paris,
France; and Charlottesville, Virginia USA).
In each location and under each symbolic name, these portraits are a testament to
Muholi’s laboring body and to overwhelming feats of intimacy and visual play achieved
astride the lens. When in front of the camera lens, if the artist is not directly confronting
the camera’s gaze head on, she is tucking into herself, allowing light to pass over her
often-nude body in dramatic contrast (FIG. 28). As critic Zack Newick observes, Muholi,
“[b]y turning the lens on herself during these expeditions, retains her connection with her
community of origin, her body of work, and her assailment of the ‘otherness’ attached to
it.”
52
Muholi, self-described as a visual activist, speaks for South Africa’s at risk

52
“Zanele Muholi’s Sense of Self, at Yancey Richardson.” Artsy. N.p., 13 Nov. 2015. Web. 29
Apr. 2016.
203
LGBTQI communities despite her body’s location. Her images, as witnessed (and heard)
by Newick seem to always be saying, “Listen up.”
53

Muholi’s self-portraits find a unique place in this dissertation as one of the few
bodies of work that has not been viewed in person. I did not spend time within each
image’s vicinity, an important methodological departure. However, the artist’s high
contrast black and white self-staged portraits share another proximity to the research
process, my body, and my own creative practice. That is, only days before a final
deadline for the dissertation, I found myself rummaging through a rather disorganized
archive of negatives, silver-gelatin prints, and burned CDs from a photo career buried
under seven years of dust and five years of random articles, overstuffed spiral notebooks,
and graduate school seminar papers. It was a search conducted in haste, and was sparked
by my clicking through the online images from Muholi’s “Somnyama Ngonyama.”
Muholi’s images, for me, are deeply personal; seeing them triggered a memory of my
own self-dealings. As I spend hours poring over the striking images of Muholi on my
iMac, her recent self-staged portraits helped me to theorize past explorations astride the
lens of my own camera.
In 2009 and 2010, I turned the camera once again on my own body (FIG. 29-34).
It was several years after my first bathroom explorations and I approached the task with
an entirely different purpose. I had spent over a decade in the modeling industry and
having complete strangers take what they wanted from my image: the commercial gaze’s
sharp focus set on skin, hair, features, and at other times, caught the lines and contours of
my body as haute couture hung from my frame. Finally, I decided to have a look for
myself—not a temporally limited look in front of a mirror, but a lasting look imprinted in

53
Ibid.
204
35mm film and produced through time spent hovering in the dark. It was a meditative
experience—one of deep searching, longing, and then more searching. I could not find
the woman whose likeness hung in Target®, or who populated various fashion
magazines, or whose figure wafted across long runways to pulsing music and flashing
lights. She did not appear as chemicals met in the darkroom at my school photo lab.
Someone else did. What is it then about the camera, about the conditions in which our
bodies exist (black and woman) that compels artists across diverse Afro-diasporic
experiences of blackness and womanhood to approach image making in this way—
through searching, longing, and introspection?
New York Times art writer Jenna Wortham got a rare look into the studio practice
(read labor) of Muholi, and documented the experience in her October 2015 piece,
“Zanele Muholi’s Transformations.”
54
During her visit to Muholi’s New York apartment,
Wortham recounts a long day, turned into a long night in preparation to shoot what
resulted in a mere few self-staged images of the artist. Working with her assistant, Lerato
Dumse, Muholi finally started setting up to shoot at 10P.M. on the day of Wortham’s
visit. The writer watched Muholi fashion props, apply tape to her own body, and set up
lighting, all the while frequently visiting her image in a pink plastic mirror and listening
to African gospel museum on her computer.
55
Muholi described her self-portraiture “as
confrontational, an inward examination that could border on violence,” an exercise that
required “dredging up dormant emotions and painful memories and then putting them on
display.” Wortham notes that the “lengthy preparation bordered on playful, but Muholi

54
Wortham, Jenna. “Zanele Muholi’s Transformations.” The New York Times 8 Oct. 2015.
NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.
55
Ibid.
205
insists that is not pleasurable, but necessary.”
56
In the epigraph for this section, the artist
notes the difficulty of turning the camera back on oneself. Mujoli says of this difficulty,
“you want to tell the truth, but at the same time you have reservations for confronting the
self, dealing with you.”
57
Muholi’s work some seven years later, helps me in the dealing.
Understanding this process as labor not in vain, but labor well worth the at times
agonizing effort. To quote Wortham’s piece at length here, I understand these
observations to be epitomizing astride the lens labor in all of its complicated form and
function:
Muholi told me she was trying to find her own language to articulate the long-
lasting effects of the politics that have defined her life. She grew up in a culture
steeped in rich, idiomatic expressions, and visually, her work echoes that
tradition. Muholi is reaching deep into herself, sucking out the troubled history in
her marrow. Her self-portraits explode stereotypes of African women while
evoking them, implicating the viewers for summoning those clichés as they gaze
upon her skin. What does it mean to see Muholi’s face surrounded by clothespins
and see a headdress? Where have you seen these images before? And who took
them?

After a few shots, Muholi removed the fruit basket from her head and sat down at
the kitchen table to load the images into Photoshop. She rapped her knuckles on
the table while she waited, fretting out loud that the concept wouldn’t work. The
images appeared, and she sighed and rubbed her face wearily. ‘‘Something’s not
right,’’ she said softly. I couldn’t see what she meant — the low-lit room had
created a soft palette of silvers and grays, and Muholi’s eyes were ablaze. She was
almost glaring, as if challenging the viewer to interpret her tableau. The taped
lines of the makeshift body armor cut eye-catching white divots into her smooth
skin. The image was stunning. But night was slipping into morning, and Muholi
was still not satisfied.
58

Perhaps this dissatisfaction was the feeling that visited me when I could not locate the
model when searching astride the lens. Muholi demonstrates this labor, astride the lens,
as an endeavor to create a new visual vocabulary of the self. The image of my body was

56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
206
embedded in rich vernaculars of fashion, commodities, beauty, and industry, so much so
that the images I was able to produce myself echoed this context. And yet there was also
a disruption of the visual conventions of this context as my body implicated then
unknown/unidentified viewers—daring them to look while also troubling the very image
that is offered up for such gazing. This is result of the power and potential of labor
performed astride the lens—visual manifestos that perform a confrontational and
corrective gesturing for both the artist and the viewer.

Transplanted Self: a Conclusion
“We’ve been influenced by the pessimistic vision of photojournalism, and the
obsessive, perfect fashion aesthetic...These images are still in my mind, printed in
my subconscious. It is time to transcend them.” –Delphine Diallo

When imagining and developing a language for out of turn presence—a radical
presence that can be experienced through the art object of the self-portrait— I was
presented with several opportunities to reach outside the dissertation’s central archive to
explore other women of color artists doing similar work. When I yielded to one such
moment, the creative practice of emerging French-Senegalese photographer and mixed-
media artist Delphine Dia Diallo became equally important to the early advances in my
thinking astride the lens. In fact, I have chosen to close the final section of my final
chapter with Diallo as a critical gesture in future casting—in projecting the import of
these methodologies onto emerging artists and into our future. Like the other artists
discussed in this chapter, Diallo adopts and deploys structures of narcissism, alongside
the dissonant method of speaking and existing outside and out of order, as a strategic way
207
to negotiate and subvert both silence and invisibility across art and cultural history.
59
In
recognizable fashion, Diallo seems to be consciously experimenting with ways of
“doing” her body differently in her creative practice, reconfiguring her own body on
display and performing in front of and behind the camera’s lens.
As we have gathered in our explorations, the iconography of the female body,
specifically the non-white female body, has been systemically over determined and
mythically configured. Yet there are ways to read for the viability of Diallo’s self-portrait
practice—her making use of her own materiality—as putting her figure to work for her
own aesthetic, sexual, and political uses. Diallo’s work, like O’Grady’s, Piper’s, and
Weems’, can be linked to and traced from historical ways of knowing the black female
body within the visual field, specifically through other artists’ work like that of Renee
Cox and Tracy Rose. Her work allows for the reconsideration of historically rooted
traditions in representations of black women’s bodies, while providing fresh images and
perspectives to reinvigorate those central theories and debates.
In this context, Diallo’s work provides an occasion to meditate on and close with
my understanding of the transplanted self as a continuation of this exploration of radical
self-portraiture. When discussing a profound (and perhaps alien) presence, the
transplanted self-portrait stages the self-image for its inevitable removal—its physical
transfer onto foreign objects and/or bodies. In this way, the act of transfer becomes an
extension of astride the lens labor. This self-portrait transplantation, as a creative strategy
for existing out of turn, is clearly evidenced in Diallo’s “The Soul in a World without

59
My reading of Diallo’s work is inspired by artist Lyle Ashton Harris’s use of radical and
redemptive narcissism in relation to Black self image making in art. Also, Amelia Jones theorizes
narcissism in her chapter on Hannah Wilke in Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998).
208
Soul” (2011), a piece in collaboration with artist Sidi (Leghead).
“The Soul in a World without Soul” is one collaborative piece within her larger
series Empire of Illusion, which is a collection of photographic collages. In these images,
Diallo uses the black female body as a canvas on which to project an alternative material
flesh using dollar bills, newspaper clippings and fashion magazines spreads (FIG.35).
This excessive flesh that Diallo and Sidi produce on Diallo’s body is transplanted—
excised from the black body—and moved to another (Sidi’s body). In this image, one that
I am calling a radical transplanted self-portrait, the viewer is initially confronted with the
central figure of a black male. This black male figure, the artist Sidi (Leghead), holds to
his face a mask molded of paper-mache dollar bills (FIG 36). Astride the lens, Diallo
performs her own excess flesh self-portrait, as it is her own image that the mask is
molded from. Here, the both the production and the display of this money mask
references the same fraught issues of historical exploitation and erasure previously
discussed, as well as, the inventive technologies of self-making through the radical self-
portrait, which is now transplanted.
The first phase of this piece is Diallo sitting for her own camera as her
collaborator drapes dollar bills over her face and neck, allowing the pieces to dry in an
accurate and recognizable cast of her face. Once the mask—the artist’s likeness—has set,
it is transplanted from Diallo onto Sidi’s body, which now sits for the camera. Diallo then
moves to the other side of the camera—behind the viewfinder—and shoots the male artist
donning the dollar portrait of herself. Diallo’s image, the excessiveness of the dollar bill
flesh, is transplanted onto the figure of another, which produces a different object,
another type of artwork.
209
The artist constructs, stages, and captures her image cemented together with the
paper currency and its transplantation on the body of a black male, compounding the
meaning of the self, its multiplication and dissemination, and the multifaceted
relationship of that self to capital, society, and perhaps others. I make the argument that
Diallo’s self-excess and the way in which she wields her self-image via radical
transplantation is another vital way to understand astride the lens creative practice.
Despite her physical body’s absence, her face haunts the frame.
Like many artists, Diallo is not uncomplicated or unproblematic; however, her
rich and rapidly growing art practice does provide an interesting archive to mine for its
use of self-portraiture, embodied visual performances, and even her experimental and
playful attempts at “doing her body differently” in front of and behind her own camera
lens. Furthermore, Diallo’s willingness to sit for other photographers, for both
commercial and artistic purposes, speaks to and makes explicit the multifaceted labor
dynamic constitutive of her and other black women’s art practices. Often, she will
appropriate these images for her own mixed-media uses, continuing the visual
construction, splitting, and multiplication of her image, while inserting herself into
collaborative creative partnership with such images and their makers.
It is my goal that the particular labor and skillset necessary for producing self-
images in this context can be further engaged through my ever-developing theoretical
framework of working astride the lens. Ultimately, this chapter sought to understand,
name, and complicate such positions and artistic strategies, especially, as they have
stemmed from or share an affinity toward direct address methodologies. It is in these
conscious or unconscious negotiations, which take place on either side of the camera that,
210
invest these subjects (women of color in particular) with social capital and mobility. This
is connected to the subject’s sense of self, self-pleasure, self-making, and self-liberation.
Finally, I argue that through astride the lens labor these women artists achieve the task of
making the self—the artists’ body—visible and legible within an institutional domain
structured for their dismissal and erasure. These radical portraits require viewers to think
more acutely about women of color bodies in the visual field and the ways in which they
become visually knowable through a dynamic milieu of creative labor, performance, and
cultural practice.

211
CONCLUSION: Sugar Baby, and the “co-opting nature of so-called
postmodern cultural conditions”
1

Writing a dissertation is deeply personal—for everyone, I would imagine.
Conducting the research for and writing of this particular dissertation was personal for
me, namely because of the lifelong creative practice as a biracial black woman existing
across multiple creative and intellectual contexts and at the intersections of so many rich
experiences. As a scholar artist, some of the objects I have studied and the creative
projects I have pursued have shape shifted over the years. However, my investments have
always remained the same. I am invested in the visual semiotics of women-identified
artists of color, and in investigating how they come into the visual field through diverse
artistic entry points and claim a space for themselves. This dissertation has sought to
engage deeply with the art objects that have populated the contemporary art museums I
have frequented over the course of my formal education. The pieces represented are ones
that I have happened upon coincidentally and works that I went searching for, at times
with the same longing that I went searching for myself in my self-portraits.
In many ways, this dissertation is a kind of self-portrait. It documents
innumerable hours spent wandering, searching self-reflexively through contemporary art
museums and galleries looking for others—and perhaps finding myself. This dissertation
evidences this exploration, and also the deep listening—the straining—for voices that
fleetingly populated these esteemed cultural institutions: the voices of women of color
artists. They spoke out of turn, against the institutions that held them, and I listened. It

1
Here, I once again invoke Chela Sandoval, especially her reading of Frederick Jameson, whose
late twentieth-century cultural critiques question how oppositional activity and consciousness are
possible under “the co-opting nature of so-called postmodern cultural conditions” (Sandoval 43).
212
was through these artists that I discovered direct address art; I fell in love with the
implications. I hope that at the very least this dissertation is a love letter, an unfolding
romance that treats with care the work of the artists represented, and meditates sincerely
on parts of their work others may have overlooked. That being said, in all genuine and
loving relationships, critique is inevitable and I would do a disservice to the time spent
amongst this powerful art if I did not recognize its limitations, especially in the clutches
of neoliberal capitalist patriarchy.
Upon entry into graduate school and since the early moments of circulating ideas
about my dissertation, the name of renowned visual artist Kara Walker has been on the
minds and in the conversations I have had with almost everyone I have encountered. In
seminars, qualification examinations, conferences, prospectus writing, small-talk on
campus and at gallery events, conversations on the street, and even now as I sit down to
write my conclusion—at every turn, the presence of Walker’s art has haunted my work.
The phenomenon of this haunting is an interesting one to note considering the locus of
this project. There is an unspoken (and often spoken) expectation that my project should
include Walker’s work, and this expectation is as concerning as it is telling.
Kara Walker has maintained a hypervisible art world presence through her
infamous early cut-paper silhouettes and now her widely attended and discussed Summer
2014 sugar installation in New York’s rundown Domino Sugar Factory. Walker has been
written into American art and cultural history through prolific journal articles and book
length publications, which have been supplemented by innumerable online publications,
dissertations, blogs, conference presentations, museum forums, and community ‘think-
tanks,’ just to name a few. Yet still there has been a pressure for this dissertation to
213
follow suit. What is it about Walker’s work that signals such passion and anxiety, and
demands such a commitment?
On October 11
th
, 2014 Walker and film director Ava DuVernay came together in
a Los Angeles auditorium as part of the The Broad museum’s “The Un-Private
Collection,” a conversation series. The two cultural producers used the time to discuss
Walker’s monumental installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage
to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane
fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino
Sugar Refining Plant (FIG.37-39), which opened at the Domino Sugar factory in
Brooklyn, New York on May 10th, 2014 and was exhibited there until July 6, 2014.
Modeled in the form of a kneeling nude black mammy sphinx, complete with vulva and
large breasts, Sugar Baby stood 35-feet tall and weighed 30 tons. The sculpture was an
outcome of the crystallization of both the colonial past it referenced and the artist who
materialized its existence. Walker and DuVernay’s conversation was advertised as an
opportunity to discuss Walker’s creative process and their shared and divergent insights
on making visual works across creative mediums. Despite this framing, the actual
conversation was a rehearsal of common anxieties regarding black creative expression,
the hypervisible display of the black female body, and most interestingly in the context of
the dissertation, Walker’s intent, her audience’s reception, and the afterlife (read
haunting) of Sugar Baby.
The concern with audience reception is familiar territory when discussing
Walker’s art. However, with Sugar Baby, Walker was forced to address the issues
involving spectatorship head as the giant sculpture made its online début only moments
214
after its opening. During these first days, the sculpture went viral in a string of hashtags,
Instagrams, Tweets, online blogs, and memes. Hordes of people eagerly awaited a few
moments with the gargantuan sugar sculpture. And the response was quite the scene
brimming with unexpected and yet unsurprising horrors. Predominantly white art
connoisseurs both young and old posed with the sugar work, gesturing inappropriately at
its genitalia, some even touching the work and making obscene sexual suggestions.
The imagery of the black mammy figure and its hypervisible and hypersexualized
depiction is not a new theme in Walker’s work. However, when removed from the white-
walled mausoleum of the art museum, or its two-dimensional cut paper shadow, and
instead is constructed within an abandoned sugar factory, this figure was left
underprotected (if she ever was afforded protection), and at the mercy of the masses all
too ready to display their own complex and frightful [in]humanity. What is it about the
physical space of an installation site that encourages a particular kind of embodied and
performative engagement with art objects? What is it about a monument to labor
exploitation and black womanhood that opens itself up to a kind of hypervisual public
violence—where art connoiseurs take physical liberties with particular kinds of art
objects?
The audience that filled The Broad event, interestingly enough, was
predominantly black and/or local art industry participants, scholars, and activists. Having
attended several artist talks where Kara Walker is either the subject or is inevitably
invoked, often in conflicting and impassioned terms, I have always been intrigued by her
ability as an artist to incite such rage and controversy. Even in this current moment, when
those most vocally against her work have since left their fiery pulpits and have more-or-
215
less resigned in apathy and ambivalence—the auditorium was on edge and wound tight,
an atmosphere DuVernay played up in her line of questioning. What easily became the
most intriguing moment in their uncomfortable exchange was one simple statement from
Walker about the last moments of the exhibition:
“In the last couple of hours, on the last day of the piece, I sent my team of video
artists to record the audience interacting with the piece, and um, I’m working with
a lot of this footage right now and figuring out what to do with it.”
2

Walker discussed the “sea of humanity” represented in the captured footage at
Sugar Baby’s closing. The video team recorded everything from people performing lewd
and offensive gestures, to families with children posing together nonchalantly. Some
spectators enabled others in their interactions with the sculpture. For example, several
women sent their partners closer, gesturing with their hands, prodding, “Do this! Do
this!” And partners responded physically, or verbally, “Don’t make me do that,” as
Walker recounts. DuVernay and Walker briefly discussed people’s general anxieties and
discomfort with big bodies, specifically those of black women who are voluptuous, “the
sort of earth mother and then the concubine all embedded in one body,” as DuVernay put
it. As Walker ruminates, and as Chapter 1 of this dissertation explored—in addition to the
essays, complaints, and tweets responding to the parade that took place in reaction to
Sugar Baby—the installation somehow activates its own history, all the while
reactivating the histories it contains and that contain it. In the chaotic physical and
hypervisual response to sugar in the form of a particular kind of black womanhood,

2
The Un-Private Collection: Kara Walker and Ava DuVernay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA1brfeJfaw
216
something shows up about ourselves as a society, “we have met the enemy and he is us,”
as Walker reflects. The artist describes exposing this tension as her goal.
3

I chose to end my dissertation with perhaps the most widely known black
contemporary artist in the history of American art, and one of the most-discussed
contemporary installation works in the past 10 years for two reasons. First, this
dissertation has sought to examine and theorize both silence and erasure in American art
musems, the strategy of direct address art, and theories of performance and spectatorship
using feminist theories, embodied methodological approaches, and the artwork of five
women-identified artists of color. Rather than deliberate over why Kara Walker has
become a proxy for many of the central concerns of the dissertation, I chose to distill the
methodological impulses of direct address art made by women of color in a way that
opens up space for the critical examination of the kind of spectator relationships that
structure the responses to hypervisible artists such as Walker.
The second reason it seems fitting to conclude this dissertation with Sugar Baby
in particular is for the ways in which the sugar sculpture itself exemplifies what Frederick
Jameson, Chela Sandoval, and Roderick Ferguson have identified as the co-opting
impulse of oppositional creative practice in neoliberal capitalist cultural institutions. The
dissertation demonstrates the power and potential of direct address artworks for causing
disruption and catalyzing a politics of reorientation within western-centered art
establishments. But it also demonstrates the limitations of this work both conceptually,
and as the art is displayed in American fine art institutions. For example, in Chapter 1, I
explore through ethnographic phenomenology the limitations of Adrian Piper’s 1988
video installation Cornered. Through these limitations, I am able to develop new ways

3
Ibid.
217
for theorizing the work’s reception in our current moment. In Chapter 3, I examine the
productivity in performance art’s “failures,” specifically, I discuss Coco Fusco and
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West , and Lorraine
O’Grady’s MBN. The interventions presented here are critically important, and they are
also indicative of the multifaceted and complicated interworkings of power, which is
always both consensual and coersive, restrictive and liberatory.
The dissertation attempts to work against the kind of individualism and tokenism
of which Walker and her art are the largest examples in American contemporary art
history, and perhaps global recognition of African American creative production as well.
By individualism and tokenism, I mean the ways in which singular visibility, value and
importance is placed on Walker’s creative production in place of diverse black and brown
feminist expressive practices. Furthermore, while Walker’s art is without a doubt
important and necessary, and to no fault of her own, the singular signs and images
embedded within her work come to signal a whole generation of artists, and obscure an
important and under theorized history of practices and processes. Nevertheless, I end with
this tokenized artist and her iconic work, because Walker’s Sugar Baby and its popular
and critical reception demonstrate the affective power of certain non-white cultural
productions to generate a response to what is racialized as black: subjects, matter, space,
experience. The installation also is an example of the larger cultural significance of the
economic apparatus of both the far reaching legacy of labor exploitation within sugar
industries as well as the complex politics of spectatorship in this contemporary moment.
Specifically, when spectatorship is centered on the overwhelming presence of a black
woman in the context of fine art.
218
Seeing Sugar Baby in New York was a multi-sensory experience and a revelation
of how synesthesia shapes audience engagement with black subjects and histories of
display. But most importantly, I end with Sugar Baby because it continues to loom in my
consciousness as a clear and visceral moment of being captured by an out of place and
out of turn presence, which was further implicating for those of us who could hear her
speaking. This hearing was made difficult (almost impossible) as the sugar sculpture was
enveloped, trapped like many of the works discussed throughout, in the still
overwhelmingly neoliberal (and white) spaces where contemporary art is housed.

219
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Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

1
FIGURE 1: Adrian Piper Mythic Being Series (1973)

FIGURE 2: Adrian Piper Cornered (1988); installation view

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

2
FIGURE 3: Shirin Neshat Turbulent (1998); video stills

FIGURE 4: Shirin Neshat Turbulent (1998); video still

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

3

FIGURE 5: Carrie Mae Weems Constructing History (2008); production still

FIGURE 6: Carrie Mae Weems Constructing History (2008); video still
Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

4

FIGURE 7: Carrie Mae Weems. And I Cried from From Here I Saw What
Happened and I Cried, 1995–96. Chromogenic print with etched text on
glass, 42 x 31 in. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art

FIGURE 8: Carrie Mae Weems “You Became Playmate to the Patriarch,” “And Their
Daughter,” from From Here I Saw What Happened.
Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

5

FIGURE 9: Lorraine O’Grady Cutting Out the New York Times; installation view,
Daniel Reich temp space, Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2006

FIGURE 10: Lorraine O’Grady “The
Renaissance Man is Back in Business”
(Part 2), in Cutting Out the New York
Times (1977).

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

6

FIGURE 11: Lorraine O’Grady
“Missing Persons” (Part 4) in
Cutting Out the New York Times
(1977).

FIGURE 12: Lorraine O’Grady “Missing Persons,” in Cutting Out the New York Times
(1977).

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

7

FIGURE 13: Adrian Piper
Vanilla Nightmares #2
(1986); retrieved from
artic.edu

FIGURE 14: Adrian Piper Vanilla
Nightmares #8 (1986)

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

8
FIGURE 15: Shirin Neshat Speechless (1996) in Women of Allah Series.

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

9

FIGURE 16: Coco Fusco and Gómez-Peña. Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the
West (1992-1994).

FIGURE 17: Coco Fusco. “A Room of One’s Own”: Women and Power in the New
America (2006-2008).
Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

10

FIGURE 18: Lorraine O’Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire ((1980);
performance still

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

11

FIGURE 19: Lorraine O’Grady. Art Is… (Nubians); Afro-American Day
Parade, Harlem, 1983.

FIGURE 20: Lorraine O’Grady Art Is. . . (Colt 45 “African” Float); Afro-
American Day Parade, Harlem, 1983.
Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

12

FIGURE 21: Adrian Piper
Food for the Spirit (1971).

FIGURE 22: Stephanie Sparling
Williams and Adrian Piper’s
Food for the Spirit (1971) (“Me,
My Selfie, and Adrian Piper);
research image (2015).

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

13

FIGURE 23: Carrie
Mae Weems. Kitchen
Table Series (1990).

FIGURE 24: Zanele Muholi. Bona
(Charlottesville), 2015.

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

14

FIGURE 25: Z. Muholi.
“Bester II (Paris, France, 2014) FIGURE 26: Z. Muholi. “Bester V”
(Mayotte archipelago, 2015)

FIGURE 27: Z. Muholi.
“Bester IV (Mayotte, 2015)
FIGURE 28: Z. Muholi. “Bester I
(Mayotte archipelago, 2015)
Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

15
f

FIGURE 29: Zanele Muholi. Hlengiwe (Paris), 2014.

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

16

FIGURE 30-35: Stephanie Sparling
Williams, all “Untitled,” 2009-10.

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

17

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

18
FIGURE 36: Delphine Diallo and Sidi (Leghead). “The Soul in a World without a Soul”
(2011); production still

FIGURE 37: Delphine Diallo
and Sidi (Leghead). “A Soul in a
World without a Soul” (2011).

Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums
INDEX 1: Figures

19

FIGURES 38-30: Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or
the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the
unpaid and overworked Artisans who have
refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion
of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining
Plant (2014); installation views.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation examines the radical nature of women of color’s out of turn speech and presence in American contemporary art museums through the strategy known as direct address. Speaking out of Turn poses four central questions: who is allowed to speak in fine and contemporary art museums—that is, whose work is hung on gallery walls and exhibited in sites of prominence in the fine art world? How can the artistic category of direct address and the idiom ‘to speak out of turn’ be read alongside each other in order to produce new meaning in contemporary art discourse surrounding under-represented, under-exhibited, and under-theorized artists of color often excluded from these spaces? Does the direct address works made by women of color artists disrupt and/or challenge the practices of viewing art in contemporary art museums? And if so, how do these disruptions orient, disorient, or reorient art spectators? ❧ Direct address is an artistic device, as well as a loose category for art that confronts the viewer. I use video installation, mixed-media performance, radical self-portraiture, and text and textual references within visual art works as central sites for exploring and analyzing direct address. Specifically, I analyze the ways Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco Fusco mobilize direct address strategies to reveal the way the art spectator is interpellated as a political subject into social structures of gender and race and to contest the power relations embedded in fine art viewing practices. It is in this context that I develop ‘speaking out of turn’ as a specific mobilization of direct address strategies by women of color—it is both a theory and a methodology for contextualizing and rigorously engaging their creative practices. ❧ This dissertation demonstrates that, even as women identified artists of color have been begrudgingly accepted into the fine art world in the past several decades, they continue to be rendered invisible and voiceless even as their work is displayed. This research charts how these women use visual and sonic registers to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice. Specifically, I argue that ‘voice’ and ‘presence’ are registers of the visual, which must be examined in order to fully capture the political potential of visual art. Toward this end, I use an interdisciplinary set of approaches to explore the boundaries of direct address as an artistic strategy, in order to examine how its disruptive tendencies have reoriented art’s history and display.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Williams, Stephanie Sparling (author)

Core Title Speaking out of turn: race, gender, and direct address in American art museums

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/03/2016

Defense Date 06/07/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Adrian Piper,art,Carrie Mae Weems,Coco Fusco,direct address,gender,Lorraine O'Grady,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,Shirin Neshat,speaking out of turn

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kondo, Dorinne (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Jones, Amelia (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member)

Creator Email smsparli@usc.edu,stephswilliams@icloud.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-296034

Unique identifier UC11280633

Identifier etd-WilliamsSt-4732.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-296034 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WilliamsSt-4732.pdf

Dmrecord 296034

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Williams, Stephanie Sparling

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA