Identity crisis: redefining the other in Fred Wilson's Speak of me as I am

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IDENTITY CRISIS:
REDEFINING THE OTHER IN FRED WILSON‟S SPEAK OF ME AS I AM

by

Kristin D. Juarez

____________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Kristin D. Juarez

ii
Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Rhea Anastas and Julia Bryan-Wilson for
their advice and encouragement.

iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Broaching the limits of other in Speak of Me as I Am 7
Chapter 2: Turbulence: Accepting uncertainty as a state of mind 17
Chapter 3: September Dream: Deconstructing façade in Othello 29
Conclusion 40
Bibliography 44

iv
List of Figures

Figure 1: Exterior of United States Pavilion 9

Figure 2: Installation View 1 of Speak of Me as I Am 10

Figure 3: Installation View 2 of Speak of Me as I Am 11

Figure 4: Installation View 3 of Speak of Me as I Am
Including Drip Drop Plop 15

Figure 5: Installation View 4 of Speak of Me as I Am,
Including Turbulence II 21

Figure 6: Installation View 5 of Speak of Me as I Am,
Including Safe House II 21

Figure 7: Film Stills, Details of September Dream 30

v
Abstract

At the 50
th
Venice Biennale in 2003, Fred Wilson produced a series of
discrete but interrelated pieces collectively titled Speak of Me as I Am.
Comprised of Venetian Renaissance paintings, kitsch objects, and original work,
Wilson revealed the continued marginalized presence of black bodies in the
Venetian imaginary. A post-colonial analysis, though apt, provides a limited
interpretation of the work as direct critique of race in past and present Venetian
culture. It does however fail to recognize how Wilson uses Venice as a subject to
express his own subconscious and crisis of identity following 9/11. In Turbulence
and September Dream, Wilson encourages the viewer to not only recognize how
representations of others inform collective identity, but also how establishing
otherness maintains the individual psyche. By re-contextualizing otherness
within a feminist and psychoanalytic framework, Wilson‟s focus on subjectivity
during war reinterprets the political gesture in Speak of Me as I Am.

1
Introduction
In a 2005 interview regarding his recent work for the exhibition Black Like
Me (2005), artist Fred Wilson (1954- ) attempts to prompt his interviewer, Richard
Klein, to consider his work as it relates to the subconscious. Even as Klein, the
director of exhibitions of the Aldrich Contemporary Museum, marks the exhibition
as a shift in Wilson‟s work towards an expression of a more personal and
introspective voice, the interview promptly concludes with little consideration on
the matter.
1
The limits of this subconscious consideration, which is also marked
by Wilson‟s changing relationship to the art object and art institution, has been
broached by art historians but has also been underscored by resistance to view
Wilson‟s contemporary work within a different theoretical framework than has
been traditionally applied.
2

The work of Fred Wilson has been associated widely with institutional
critique and identity politics. “At the same time”, Jennifer A. Gonzalez writes, “it is
not simply an anti-authoritarian, generic critique of the institution qua institution
that is operative in this work, but more important, a specific commentary on how
the power and pervasiveness of market capitalism, patriarchy, patrimony or race
discourse operates through social institutions, especially art institutions.”
3
The
exhibition Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, an

1
Fred Wilson and Richard Klein, “Pssst! A Conversation with Fred Wilson,” in Fred Wilson Black Like
Me (Ridgefield, Connecticut: Aldrich Contemporary Museum, 2006) 20.
2
See Salah Hassan, “Fred Wilson’s ‘Black Venezia: Fictitious Histories and the Notion of ‘Truth’” in
Speak of Me as I Am; Fred Wilson and K. Anthony Appiah Interview with K. Anthony Appiah (NewYork:
Pace Wildenstein 2006).
3
Jennifer A. Gonzalez, Subject to Display Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2008), 67.

2
example of his early work, sought to illustrate the museum‟s role in preserving
and furthering social, often racialized, judgments in their decisions on how and
what they display.
4

Wilson‟s appropriation of institutions‟ collections and museum
methodology played a strong role in this early work, along with his contributions
to other biennials, including the Cairo Biennial in 1992 and the 1993 Whitney
Biennial. His interests to expose the invisible forces of institutions that contribute
to shaping society, the politics of representation, and the process of identity
exploration through historical research have carried through to his later and
contemporary practice.
5

Commissioned for United Sates pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale,
Speak of Me As I Am reflects the transformation of the formal qualities of
Wilson‟s work (from his use of juxtaposition of existing objects to creating new
pieces) sparked in part from his own uncertainty of his identity around the state of
flux that occurred after 9/11. Because Wilson attempts to address the site of
Venice through a historical “mining” typical of his early work, and more subtly as
a way to address his own process of grieving, analysis of this installation has
predominantly focused on maintaining a clear trajectory reaching back to his
watershed exhibition, Mining the Museum. Though these points of connections

4
Judith E. Stein, “Sins of omission—installation art by Fred Wilson, Historical Society, Baltimore,
Maryland,” Art in America 81, no.10 (October, 1993): 110.
5
This methodology was applied to the exhibition, So Much Trouble in the World- Believe It Or Not!
(2005), an example of Wilson’s continued exploration of identity through a process of excavation of
the Hood Museum’s collection.

3
regarding a racialized other, as a historical and contemporary subaltern subject
are most readily understood, it is in the other pieces of Speak of Me as I Am,
Turbulence II and September Dream that reflect his personal crisis of identity
where there is room for a more nuanced reading informed by feminism and
psychoanalysis.
These frameworks do not negate a post-colonial theorization of Speak of
Me As I Am, but allow for connections to be made that apply more closely to the
Freudian subconscious or psychoanalytic unconscious, shifting the meaning of
other from a strictly racialized definition to a primary distinction that informs the
construction of self, and maintenance of subjectivity. The two usages are not
mutually exclusive, for the need to distinguish oneself from another is often
informed by social constructions (e.g. gender, race, nationality, sexuality, etc.)
that enable or limit collective identity.
6
It is the intersection of these terms, located
at the shift from a collective political identity to a psychic one, that reveals layered
relationships of how Wilson addresses 9/11 as an identity crisis within the context
and history of Venice.
In shifting the lens of analysis to a feminist and psychoanalytic stance on
subjectivity in a time of war, Speak of Me as I Am is able to be interpreted
beyond a study of the Moor as a prominent yet silenced figure in Venetian
history, but also as a challenge to masculinist tendencies in war, by expressing

6
Transnational Feminists, “Transnational Feminists Against War” in After Shock September 11, 2001
Global Feminist Perspectives, eds. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter (Berkeley, California:
Publishers Group West, 2003), 85.

4
his doubt, grief, and personal crisis through the appropriation of Venice‟s most
recognizable Moor, Othello.
7
Rosalyn Deutsche writes in her essay, Hiroshima
After Iraq: A Study in Art and War, “War, in Freud‟s view, gives full play to
grandiose fantasies of invincibility, which is to say, to heroic masculinism,
understood as an orientation toward ideals of wholeness that disavow
vulnerability.”
8
Wilson‟s attempt to express grief and uncertainty of self as a
reaction to 9/11, which by 2003 had lead to war in Iraq, can therefore be
understood as a feminist gesture.
Constituted by distinct works that are informed and reinforced by each
other, Turbulence II and September Dream, are strategically positioned to echo
within each other, the former created as a black and white checkered room and
the latter as a four-channeled video that plays four versions of Othello frame-by-
frame in reverse. Through an analysis of subjectivity it becomes possible to see
how Wilson creates a dialogue with viewer, challenging him/her to understand
the process of expelling others to create their own identity. Subjectivity, Deutsche
argues, illustrates how psychoanalysis and feminism provide insights to collective
and personal identity during war.
9

The inclusion of the recent work Speak of Me as I Am by Jennifer A.
Gonzalez and Peter Erickson establishes another angle from which to approach

7
Rosalyn Deutsche explains that as a specific social institution, war becomes a lens for viewing the
construction of political subjects in relationship to patriarchy and xenophobia, which are not limited
to warfare.
8
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War” in October 131 (Winter 2010): 5.
9
Ibid., 6.

5
Wilson‟s work in which subjectivity is the focus.
10
The discussion within this
thesis takes its place among a series of art practices as well as discourses that
address the relationship of self and other, like Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, and
Rosalyn Deutsche. As cultural producers, their work establishes a commitment to
the viewer‟s experience of their own internal examination of the seemingly
dichotomous relationship. Psychoanalyst, Hanna Segal argues that in a collective
crisis, an individual‟s mental life is based upon relations with others, and cannot
be distinguished from collective identity.
11

The creation of intimate experiences that these artists and writers examine
simultaneously helps the viewer explore his/her relationship to the other by
challenging the assumptions and boundaries of self. Intimacy can be understood
in the way in which Adrian Piper articulates how the expansion of the modal
imagination is able to provide a perception of the other‟s inner state.
12
The works
by Piper and Kelly require the viewer to acknowledge the difference between
gazing and being embedded through experience of the work, engaging the
personal. The use of intimacy in each work allows for the viewer to participate in
the fulfillment of each work, allowing the works to communicate with each
individual, implying an exchange instead of representation. The experience
constructed for the viewer rejects the idea that intimacy cannot be a successful

10
See Gonzalez’s section “Neither ‘Identity’ nor ‘Ethnography’” in the Introduction to Subject to
Display. Gonzalez; Peter Erikson, “Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson's ‘Speak of Me as I Am’” in Art
Journal, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 4-19. Both begin to apply feminist and queer theory, and
also hint at psychoanalytic analysis.
11
Deutsche, “Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” 19.
12
Adrian M. S. Piper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination” Ethics 101, no. 4 (July, 1991):
726.

6
communicative device, but instead relies on the viewer‟s engagement with the
work.
Speak of Me as I Am reflects the continued primacy of challenging the
construction of identity as it unpacks the conflation of virtual access and agency
by addressing the differences of how identity is performed or depicted, as the
lines between representation and communication are blurred within the
contemporary realities of trans/ post-nationalism. Wilson‟s formal choices to
disrupt the viewer‟s stability, both optically and aurally in Turbulence II and
logically in September Dream, contribute to an internal experience subject to
psychoanalytic interpretation. Looking Jacqueline Rose, Deutsche explains that
the urgency of self-examination during war remains:
It is a central tenet of psychoanalysis,” writes Rose, that
if we can tolerate what is most disorienting—
disillusioning—about our own unconscious, we are less
likely to act on it, less inclined to strike out in a
desperate attempt to assign the horrors of the world to
someone, or somewhere, else. It is not . . . the impulse
that is dangerous but the ruthlessness of our attempts to
be rid of it.
13

Even as alluded to or suggested, the emergent role of unconscious meanings in
Wilson‟s Venice work remains conceptually in line with the stakes of his body of
work to date: exposing how individual identity is impacted by social institutions.

13
Ibid., 7.

7
Chapter 1: Broaching the limits of other in Speak of Me as I Am

As a site-specific installation, Fred Wilson uses the history of Venice to
focus on representation by exploring the historical role of black bodies in the
Venetian imaginary, raising questions about the current agency that African
immigrants currently have in the city. The title Speak of Me as I Am incorporates
the collection of works Wilson exhibits as a whole within the United States
Pavilion, and derives from Shakespeare‟s Othello, in which Othello pleads to be
remembered as he truly was, and not a distorted memory.
14
The installation,
though using Venice as the subject is meant to bring to bear larger issues of
viewing Otherness, based upon the contemporary pressures influencing
collective and personal identity. In a 2006 interview with K. Anthony Appiah,
Wilson reflected upon his work in Venice and its connections to a globalized
environment by stating, “It used to be the trials and tribulations, as well as the
successes of any group of people were only known to a few, now everything is
globalized, we are all connected. The beauty and the horror are magnified
because we can see and feel that we are all a part of it as it happens.”
15
While
the installation as a whole reflects Wilson‟s attempts to expose the tradition of
silenced figures in Venice specifically, it is also combined as Wilson states with a
complexity of emotions and abstract ideas that lead to the creation of new

14
Gonzalez, Subject to Display, 111.
15
Fred Wilson and K. Anthony Appiah, Fragments of a Conversation Fred Wilson and Anthony Appiah,
(New York: Pace Wildenstein, 2006) 16.

8
works.
16
Wilson‟s belief in globalized tangibility raises a question central to his
work: how does access to imagery change the way an individual understands
his/her position to others? The idea of interconnectedness that Wilson speaks of
returns in the way his work not only addresses representation, but also
challenges the rigid construction of self and other.
Fred Wilson utilized the exterior of the Pavilion, a neo-classical portico, to
flank the entrance with two banners that span the length of the supporting
columns. The banners depicted images of the slaves taken from the exterior of
the tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (1669), a
popular location in Venice.
17
Topping the illusory additional Caryatid columns is
the pediment in which the words Stati Uniti D’America are inscribed. The striking
imagery allowed the exterior to be misinterpreted as an allusion to the United
States‟ history, a possible pitfall by suggesting that Venice‟s history is
comparable to America‟s, which Wilson recognizes are in fact quite distinct.
18
The
trompe l‟oile does, however, bring forth a theme that continues throughout the
Pavilion: the juxtaposition of black and white, where the colors (especially black)
become stand-ins for a multitude of representations, including: race,
commoditization of oil, and mourning, marking distinctions throughout the
Pavilion between reality of being and the façade of representation.

16
Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson, “Interview,” in Fred Wilson Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge:
List Visual Art Center, 2003), 23.
17
Gonzalez, Reframing the Subject, 111.
18
Goncharov and Wilson, “Interview” in Speak of Me As I Am, 23.

9

Figure 1: Exterior view, showing banners of Melchior Barthel figures, United States Pavilion, 50th
Venice Biennale, 2003. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

The Pavilion is made up of four distinct spaces along with an atrium that
Wilson used to establish the tone for the exhibition.
19
Hanging in the atrium was a
black Murano chandelier, the famous Venetian glass traditionally used to make
white and clear chandeliers. The intended effect was to be beautiful yet mournful,
familiar but foreign. Along the back wall of the atrium is a black servant figurine
that had been altered by Wilson, replacing the head with a globe. The atrium,
serving as the entrance to the Pavilion, contained two distinct methods present in
Speak of Me as I Am: re-appropriation of objects that juxtapose kitsch and fine
art work mimicking a museum‟s display, and the fabrication of original works
conceived of by Wilson. Gonzalez offers an interpretation in which the figurine
functioned as a reminder to the viewer that these Venetian icons from the

19
Goncharov and Wilson, “Interview,” in Fred Wilson Speak of Me as I Am, 22-23.

10
Renaissance were historically transnational subjects and objects.
20
By furthering
her reading, it is possible to see how Wilson was exposing how the seemingly
contemporary concept of transnationalism is actually quite a historical idea. Yet,
it through his personal examination of self after 9/11 that he demonstrates how
the stakes have changed.

Figure 2: View of Atrium United States Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Courtesy MIT List
Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

In two of the Pavilion‟s spaces Wilson uses the technique of his early
work, where he appropriates the aesthetic of museum display to foreground
images of blacks in popular kitsch objects, fine art works in juxtaposition with life-
size black mannequins dressed in Renaissance garb, and contemporary images

20
Gonzalez, Reframing the Subject, 111.

11
of Africans in Venice. Wilson‟s inclusion of the array of representation can have
varied effects within a post-colonial framework. First, Wilson brought to the
forefront the presence of blacks in the Venetian imaginary, reminding the viewer
that while blacks were present in Venice (as evidenced in Renaissance
paintings), their actual roles have been forgotten, resulting in continual
exoticization, through kitsch. Secondly, Wilson juxtaposes popular historical
imagery that has been delegated as harmless with contemporary xenophobic
feelings toward African immigrants in Venice.

Figure 3: Installation View United States Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Courtesy MIT List
Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

Wilson states in his interview with Kathleen Goncharov that he was
attempting to present a “Moro” view, which is distinct from both and American
and Venetian views, and is akin to his own feelings of being an outsider. The
reality remains however, that because there is no historical documentation of the
“Moro” perspective, historical Venetian representation becomes a site for his own

12
projections, where blackness often operated as metaphor. In his essay for
Wilson‟s catalogue for Speak of Me as I Am, art historian Paul H.D. Kaplan
explains that Renaissance paintings reveal that blacks were both denigrated and
honored as subjects, suggesting that blackness was often used to represent the
concept of outsiders, a tool to further a collective Venetian identity.
21

Though there has been a tendency to make direct connections to his
earlier work like Mining the Museum and Phanta Rei: A Gallery of Ancient
Classical Art (1992), the relation of those exhibitions to Speak of Me as I Am is
less concrete that it initially appears. While Wilson was utilizing the same
techniques of museum display, it is not clear if the art objects are artifacts of
myth or fact. In “Fred Wilson‟s „Black Venezia‟: Fictitious Histories and the
Notion of „Truth‟” Salah Hassan asserts that Wilson is furthering a post-colonial
revision of European history by presenting real histories, along with fictional
myths like Othello. The “fictitious histories” that Hassan refers to is directed
towards the omissions of the ethnic others in European painting, as a way to
project a world that reinforces the belief of white male cultural superiority.
22

Hassan‟s assessment that Wilson is inserting a subaltern voice into history is
based on the assumption that the blacks in Venetian Renaissance paintings are
real people, an assumption that Wilson also makes.
23
A strictly postcolonial

21
Paul H.D. Kaplan, “Local Color: The Black African Presence in Venetian Art and History” in Fred
Wilson Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge: List Visual Arts Center MIT, 2003,) 8.
22
Salah Hassan, “Fred Wilson’s ‘Black Venezia’: Fictitious Histories and the Notion of ‘Truth’” in Fred
Wilson Speak of Me as I Am ( Cambridge: List Visual Arts Center MIT, 2003), 37.
23
Goncharov and Wilson, 22-23.

13
interpretation of Speak of Me can limit the work‟s function as an exercise in
revisionist art history. Wilson however, is not only interested in the reality of those
in the paintings, but the reality of those who are alluded to through
representation. For those who truly existed, their absence continues.
The “truth,” it seems, which Wilson addresses in the subsequent spaces of
the pavilion, is that the black figures in Renaissance paintings function the same
way as they do in Shakespeare‟s Othello, as representations of blackness,
creating physical stand-ins for otherness. The most compelling reading of this
section of the exhibition is made by Gonzalez, who argues this work is impactful,
“…because he once again brings to our attention our own viewing apparatus,
namely, the spectator‟s position vis-à-vis the black body as object and subject...
In short, the work is as much about activities and habits of vision as it is about
black bodies per se.”
24
In attempting to recognize the act of viewing, he is also
calling attention to how black bodies act sites for projection.
In the past, Wilson has distinguished between his artist-as-curator role
and his personal practice, which is also visible in the Pavilion. In the Pavilion‟s
third space, where Wilson‟s new glasswork was displayed, he utilized the color
contrast between black and white. As one of the last of the kitsch objects, Wilson
displays Shatter (2003), a group of glass candelabras, whose translucent bodies
have black arms and heads, with the exception of one, whose head has been

24
Gonzalez, Reframing the Subject, 117.

14
transformed into a Molotov cocktail.
25
Juxtaposed against the opposite wall is a
series of four images of grotesque caricatures of a black man, whose literal
blackness is contrasted with his white clothing. On the center wall is Drip Drop
Plop, a series of glass-blown black drops, some of them with eyes, appear to
cascade down the wall and puddle on the floor. Wilson has resisted attributing a
specific meaning to the piece in order to allow the viewer to project his/her own
meaning onto blackness. While initially conceived of as the visualization of the
body disintegrating into amorphous spots, he has later suggested that as stand-
ins for blackness, Drip, Drop, Plop also acts to dissipate meaning rather than
solidifying it.
26
The final association is often made to a line in Othello that follows
from the recital of „speak of me as I am‟ that reads: “one whose subdued eyes/
Albeit unused to the melting mood/ Drop tears as fast as Arabian trees/ Their
medicinal gum.”
27
The inclusion of the three pieces in one room offer the viewer
the possibility to uphold, to demolish, or to mourn the use of blackness as a
commodity, evidenced by prevalence of kitsch, as stereotype, and as a location
in which meaning gets ascribed and projected.
The final space marked Wilson‟s shift from methodological distance to
intimacy through an installation that simultaneously implicated himself and the
viewer. Turbulence and September Dream are two works that have been largely
ignored by critics and art historians. In the context of Speak of Me as I Am the

25
Ibid., 112.
26
See Goncharov, “Interview” in Speak of Me, 24; Appiah Interview, 16.
27
Gonzalez, Reframing the Subject, 117.

15
two work function together reacting to 9/11. By interweaving historical
representation and narrative with his own state of being, Wilson was attempting
to accept uncertainty of world events and the future of his selfhood.

Figure 4: Installation View including Drip, Drop, Plop on the left. United States Pavilion, 50th
Venice Biennale, 2003. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

The first half of the Pavilion was dedicated to exposing the representation
of blackness as a façade of agency, allowing the viewer to acknowledge his/her
position as a spectator. The second half challenged the viewer to make choices
between gazing and being embedded within the work. In Turbulence II and
September Dream, Wilson inserts his identity into a narrative that is both
historical and contemporary, site specific and trans-national, making the
representation of his subjectivity into a political act. Mary Kelly has stated that by
engaging feminist and psychoanalytic theory in art making, the artists can reach
beyond the image of sexual difference and engages with “… extending the

16
interrogation of the object to include the subjective conditions of its existence,
turning political intent to personal accountability, and translating institutional
critique into the question of authority.”
28
It is with this in mind that Wilson‟s “Moro”
view as an outsider speaks to an otherness that reaches beyond the specificity of
race, and more towards the process of defining other occurs as a result of
maintaining one‟s identity.

28
Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), xxiii

17
Chapter 2: Turbulence: Accepting uncertainty as a state of mind
Turbulence II, constructed as a freestanding room, is an installation that
used the checkering of black and white tile to create the surrounding walls and
floor. The ceramic tiles had a glass glaze, resulting in a gloss that lends a visual
relationship to the other glass pieces in Speak of Me. Written on the grout
between the tiles are excerpts from various narratives, like that of Incidents of a
Life of Slave Girl, to express the simultaneity of captivity and freedom.
29
Wilson
has likened these notes to the walls of men‟s restrooms, in which individuals,
though anonymous, are speaking out to a viewer.
30

Wilson collapsed historical narratives within the contemplation of a
concrete contemporary moment, constructing a continuum of subjectivity that
derives from moments of crisis. The significance of Wilson‟s act can be read
through the articulation by Simon Leung, an artist and writer who expressed the
following opinion to the 2008 questionnaire issued by the journal October,
regarding activism in art and in general against the Iraq War and the “war on
terror”:
I find the most compelling works activating a challenge to
war to be works that addresses the power of the state as it
intersects the psyche, ones which engage the
correspondence between aesthetic/political/form/subject
and the effects and affects of
power. As such they often do not address this war as
being separate from other wars or other economies of
power; they often interpolate representations of the

29
Huey Copeland, “Out of the Well,” in Black Like Me (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Contemporary, 2006),
29.
30
Appiah and Wilson, Interview, 21.

18
mechanisms of power with signs of resistance; they often
contemplate the vicissitudes of daily life held hostage by
masculinist drives toward domination—some of them
leading to war. In other words, they tend to frame another
order of time within our time of war, and simultaneously
trace the violence of war in the everyday. They tend to
slow down violence, which nevertheless does not “end.”
31

Wilson‟s expression of self through metaphor, in which form and subject are
inextricable, articulates a form of resistance.
Within the room there were two inkwells recessed into the floor, a speaker
system that played excerpts from various plays and operas of Othello, and
against one wall two black mirrors were paired side by side. The inkwells
functioned as an allusion to oil and the dependence of the West on the Middle
East for this commodity, implicating the viewer as part of the degrading system.
32

Though Wilson recognizes how greed for oil has changed the face of the world,
he does not distinguish this from American slavery, or the legacy of black
stereotypes in Venice.
Also within the room lay oversized ceramic pot entitled Safe House II
within which was a bed along with accessories one would need to remain in
comfort space: a pair of jeans, reading material, a coffee cup, television, and
reading lamp. First conceptualized as Safe Haven, it was developed as his
mother became increasingly ill. Wilson describes one aspect of the work as
deriving from a desire to return to the womb.
33
Glazed in matte black, it was

31
Simon Leung, Response in October 123 (Winter 2008): 103-104.
32
Klein and Wilson, “Pssst! A Conversation with Fred Wilson,” 16.
33
PBS Art: 21 episode, Fred Wilson Interview, in “Structures,” 2005.

19
meant to differ from the seductive gloss from the ceramic tile, emphasizing
domestic space.
34
The conflation of the womb with the pot derived from Wilson‟s
study of ceramics in Ghana, where the process of women making pots was done
in their laps, appearing to him as an extension of their bodies, as “pregnant
bellies”.
35
It also references their historical use as burial pots.
36

Its insertion into Turbulence II merges the need to withdraw to a
comforting space as a metaphor to the womb and to death. The hollowed round
space within the pot is large enough to support inhabitation, yet the opening
encloses the space, suggesting both safety and alienation.
37
The uncertainty of
the space as a result, simultaneously expresses the desire and rejection of the
piece as a site for both the initiation and termination of life. Reinforced by the
literal echo of quotes from Othello, the space is informed by a tenuous
relationship between tragedy and safety. Reflecting origins of personal crisis,
Safe House II responds to the collective crisis of 9/11.
38
By returning to the
primacy of viewing himself in his mother, Wilson expresses the necessity to
reject her as the first exercise necessary to distinguish self from the other.
Looking to Julia Kristeva, Carolyn Korsmeyer interprets the process of expulsion
of the mother as abjection:

34
Appiah and Wilson, Fragments, 23.
35
Peter Erickson, “Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson's "Speak of Me as I Am"” in
Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005): 13.
36
Ibid., 13.
37
Gonzalez also references the dichotomy of sanctuary and imprisonment, but does not continue this
thought or where it comes from. See Gonzalez, Reframing the Subject, 118.
38
Wilson and Goncharov, Interview in Speak of Me, 24.

20
Abjection is requisite for subjective identity to
develop, it is a necessary process for a self to come
into being. But there is also a loss in becoming an
independent self, for one is forever separate from
the maternal plenitude that originally sustained one.
That sense of loss is retained in the allure of the
abject, for there is a desire to be reunited with that
oneness; at the same time, reuniting entails
extinguishing one‟s individual identity. That is, it
entails the death of the subject, which is horrifying
and terrible prospect as well. And yet, there is a
terrible magnetism to the idea that one might relax
back into plenitude, even while losing one‟s identity
in so doing…No one wants to lose one‟s identity, to
die, and yet there is an unconscious attraction that
lingers in the abject.
39

As a site to express anxiety, Wilson expresses the uncertainty of individual
identity after 9/11, questioning if his own subjectivity will continue to exist in the
same manner as before. As a place of refuge and reassurance, it is an inventory
of necessities, though the items are more for assurance than for physical
survival. It can be understood as a personal compilation of items that Wilson
would need, or as an offer to the viewer, to provide security against the
threatening uncertainty that plagues identity when crisis occurs within
contemporary society.

39
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2004), 149.

21

Figure 5: Installation View of Turbulence II United States Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003.
Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

Figure 6: Safe House II United States Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Courtesy MIT List
Visual Arts Center Photograph by R. Ransick/A. Cocchi

Wilson‟ need to construct a safe place reflects a process of defining
those important objects that reiterate his own identity/subjectivity within the world,
and then hording them. The art/architecture reference books are comforting and
stable as reflections of canonized knowledge, and newspapers and a television

22
act as links to the outside world. If inhabited the safe house would isolate the
individual (it only has space for one), allowing the inhabitant a one sided view of
the world outside. The art books provide grounding in the history of thought and
physical space, representing a nostalgia the way things were. He appeals to the
viewer with the insertion of European and Italian references, potentially asking
the viewer to consider what would be in his/her safe house. While the seclusion
implied in the physical intimacy of pot suggests a preservation of identity with the
comfort of the history of knowledge, physical presence, and the familiar, it also
suggests the loss of a self-identification grounded in these histories, his own
presence in the world, by relating the pot to a funerary object. As a reaction to a
collective crisis, the presence of Safe House II within Turbulence II operates as
personal crisis of being, in which Wilson expresses the conflicting desire to return
to plenitude of his mother‟s womb accompanied by reassurance of his
understanding of the world, even though the sequestration would result in the
loss of his own identity formation as a process of distinguishing self from the
other.
The physical environment of Turbulence II incorporates Safe House II to
have larger experiential and metaphorical implications. For Wilson, “Turbulence
II, the tile room, is more a state of mind than a place. The noise created by the
layering of the Othello operas and plays, the writing in the grout, the large
ceramic pot with the bed in it, the optic effect of the tile, and all the other aspects
of the room, address my uncertainty about world events. The room is both

23
familiar and foreign, institutional yet private.”
40
The visceral disorientation within
the room, which is amplified by its bareness, is contrasted by the personalized
intimate space constructed within Safe House II.
41
As a state of mind, viewer
must confront his or her reaction to the work‟s physical effects and the
relationship he/she forms to the various aspects of the room.
Both spaces provide reflexive points of entry, in which reprieve is
offered to the viewer from the physical disorientation that occurs upon entering
Turbulence. The viewer‟s subjectivity is elucidated as the viewer must decide to
reject or accept the Safe House II, asking him/her to understand his/her
relationship to the physical and metaphorical tension between the chaos and
calmness layered within Turbulence II.

Adrian Piper‟s Politics of Self-Awareness
In her philosophical writing and art production, Adrian Piper addresses the
relationship between self and other and the ethics of empathy when imagining
the other. In Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination (1991) Piper
argues that the potential to comprehend both the inner experiences of the self
and other is constituted by tenuous role of compassion and self-absorption that
depends on modal imagination, which is the ability to imagine experiences
beyond one‟s reality.
42
Modal imagination, Piper argues, preserves the

40
Wilson and Goncharov, Speak of Me, 24.
41
Peter Erickson, “Respeaking Othello,” 12.
42
Adrian M. S. Piper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination,” 737.

24
significance of human interaction, which should rely on an impartial perspective
of the inner states of self and other.
43
As interaction is conflated with access to
imagery, others are visualized as “surface objects of imagination,” which Piper
defines as objects/imagery that momentarily call your attention but are easily
diffused within your imagination, “barely disrupting our emotional and
psychological states at all.”
44
Though an individual cannot completely give up
self-centeredness or empathy, Piper argues that art has the potential to enhance
the ability to imagine modally another‟s inner state, thereby expanding one‟s
perception and emotional range.
The exploration of the relationship between self and other is explored in
her work Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978), which forces the viewers to
acknowledge their subjectivity and how their values and politics effect how the
view the work. The installation is constituted as a square white room, with an 18
by 18‟‟ journalistic photograph depicting a group of black people descending a
subway staircase, whose eyes meet the gaze of the camera. On each corner of
the wall where the photo is hung, four spotlights are directed towards the viewer
standing in front of the work, causing his/her face to be reflected off of the highly
polished glass that covers the photograph. From a Walkman a monologue is
played, directly implicating the viewer‟s internal dialogue by questioning not only

43
Ibid., 726.
44
Ibid., 723.

25
the viewer‟s relationship to the work itself, but also to larger issues of the world
represented within the work.
45
Upon reflecting on her work, Piper writes,
The point was to convey not only the political
experience of confronting racism and its effects on
distant others with whom one can connect only
through one‟s political concerts but also the
recognition that art can be just as effective a vehicle
for political catalysis as for any other kind and that self
awareness is a necessary condition of both political
awareness and, therefore, freedom from the brand of
ideological delusion the aestheticizing stance
embodies.
46

The slips created in the work, by encouraging the viewers to go between viewing
the photograph and viewing themselves, require viewers to acknowledge their
original reactions to the people in the photograph, as well as their reaction to the
monologue speaking directly to them and the assumptions of what is being said.
Piper addresses the viewers in part, as follows:
How do the images in this picture relate to each other?
How is the two-dimensionality of the picture plane
treated? How are receding spaces signified? How are
the tonal contrasts disturbed across the picture plane?
Does it matter? Are these the right questions to ask
about this work? Why use a photograph instead of
really creating something original? Why was this picture
chosen and not some other/? Why do the people in the
picture look so grim? What did the artist intend to
convey? What‟s the connection between what you see
and what you‟re hearing? Are you being preached to?
Again? What is the speaker trying to express? What do
these images mean? What‟s the significance of all the

45
Pamela Franks, “Conceptual Rigor and Political Efficacy, Or, The Making of Adrian Piper” in
Witness to Her Art Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara
Walker Daniella Rossel, and Eau de Cologne, ed. Rhea Anastas with Michael Brenson, (New York:
Distributed Art Publishers, 2006) 82- 83.
46
Adrian Piper, “Aspects from a Liberal Dilemma,” 1980 in Witness to her Art, 82- 83.

26
people in the photo being black? Of their looking angry
and sullen? Of their shabbiness? Of your emotional
distance from them? Is it aesthetic?
47

Within the work Piper is addressing what she later describes in
Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination, asking the viewer to address
how he/she maintains a level of involvement with an imaginative object. How can
the viewer‟s reactions to the people within the photograph change when he/she
attempts to decipher the image, and imagines modally people‟s inner states?
Piper argues in both works, that success is in recognizing and respecting, “both
A. the psychological boundaries of one‟s self as an acting subject and B. the
psychological boundaries of the other‟s self as an acting subject.”
48
Piper raises
political issues of the racialized other, in which she uses the installation to make
the viewer of the photograph into the spectacle, calling attention to her/his gaze.
As the monologue directs assumptions towards him/her, the viewer‟s own
reactions are scrutinized. The self-awareness that she demands of the viewer is
expanded upon as an ethical issue in the later writing, in which she argues for an
impartial view of others.
The way in which the formal qualities of Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma
lend the viewer to simultaneously view him/herself and the other is similar to the
use of the black mirrors in Turbulence II. For Wilson the mirrors are a way for his
own self-reflection (as other), though the viewer is also able to view his/her own
reflection. The effect is similar to the effect explored in his subsequent exhibition

47
Ibid., 83.
48
Adrian M. S. Piper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination,” 734.

27
in 2006, Black Like Me, deriving from the book title where the white author
undergoes physical augmentation to appear black. John Griffin writes of the
transformation,
I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the
white John Griffin. No, the reflections led back to
Africa…back the fruitless struggles against the mark of
blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation,
no advanced hint, it became clear and permeated my
whole being…I knew now black won‟t rub off. The black
man is wholly a Negro regardless of what he once may
have been.
49

The mirrors, similar to Safe House, present an opportunity where the viewer may
expect to find reprieve, but is confronted with disorientation; the reflection is
distorted, perhaps unfamiliar and alien. Though temporary, the result perhaps is
an enduring experience of the viewer, becoming an embodied subject.
50
Wilson‟s
Turbulence II allowed the viewer to experience his disorientation and uncertainty
of self that occurred after 9/11. This attempt relied on a committed viewer to
maintain a significant level of modal imagination. At the same time, Wilson
provides an outlet for the viewer to acknowledge his/her own uncertainty of self.
The simultaneity of imagining oneself and imagining another challenges the
viewer‟s perception of these rigid distinctions, creating a process in which the
viewer‟s own self-awareness creates a “depth object of imagination,” or a deeper
psychological investment in the other.

49
Barbara Thomas and Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn, So Much Trouble in the World, Believe it or Not!
(Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Hood Musuem, 2006), 46.
50
Ibid., 46.

28
By allowing the viewer to literally view and imagine him/herself as the
other, the viewer experiences a personal sense of otherness, an experience in
which he/she may becomes a foreign representation that disrupts stable
maintenance of identity. Exemplifying Wilson‟s dedication to probing self-
awareness, he is once again making the position of the spectator and the
process of viewing visible, a process that often internalizes biases and maintains
a distance of self from other. Piper has articulated this as a political act:
The antidote, I suggest, is confrontation with the sinner
with the evidence of the sin: the rationalizations, the
subconscious defense mechanisms, the tragedies of
avoidance, denial, dismissal, and withdrawal that signal
on the one hand the retreat of the self to the protective
enclave of ideology; on the other hand, precisely the
proof of subjectivity and fallibility that the ideologue is so
anxious to ignore.
51

Wilson further explores this concept in a later work, Mhole (2004) in which the
viewer is able to insert his/her head within a black glass void that is recessed into
a wall, punctuating the act of viewing and consciousness within the enclosed
space. Only as the viewer‟s position to the work changes would he/she realize
the eyes painted on the exterior, like those on Drip, Drop, Plop, turning the
personal autonomous space into a site where the viewer is seen from the outside
as a representations of blackness. It is possible to see how Wilson could then
intend for the viewer to come to terms with this simultaneity, acknowledging their
own role in upholding otherness within their identity.

51
Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 50.

29
Chapter 3: September Dream: Deconstructing façade in Othello
The video installation September Dream, which was located across from
Turbulence in the United States Pavilion, consists of a four-channeled video,
each playing different versions of Othello in reverse.
52
Though the work is directly
related to the relationship of the Othello to Venice, it simultaneously addresses
the historical and contemporary representing of blacks in Venice, the
construction of racial myths in the arts, and as a way to address the grief felt after
September 11.
53

Each version of Othello utilized in the piece is one in which Othello is
played by a white male. In speaking on deliberateness of his work, Wilson writes,
I chose representations of Othello as played by white
actors on purpose; I could have used versions with
Laurence Fishburne or James Earl Jones, to name two. I
wanted to heighten the fact that Shakespeare's Othello
is a representation of blackness, of Africanness, and not
the real thing. That Shakespeare himself was using race
as a historical marker, a visual cue, a point of bias to
make the story complex and exotic as well as familiar to
his audience. The fact that he could do this and make
Othello such a believable, "real" character speaks to his
genius. I view the title Speak of Me as I Am as the plea
of Othello, but also of all Africans, on the Continent and
off, and myself as well.
54

Wilson makes the distinction makes between the representations of blackness
and authenticity, marking the performative quality of blackness in the
consciousness of Shakespeare‟s audience, and of the contemporary viewer of

52
Wilson and Goncharov Speak of Me, 22.
53
Ibid., 24.
54
Peter Erickson, “Respeaking Othello”, 8.

30
his work. Wilson‟s appropriation challenges the notions of truth in the
construction of Africanness created for theater, as Othello was created and
continually portrayed by white men. By the slowed reversal of each scene Wilson
exposes the construction of stereotypes that were reflected and perpetuated
Othello, in which violence is racialized and villainized, reiterating how blackness
has acted as site for projection. As a critique of representation, the relationship of
Othello to Venice addresses how Shakespeare used blackness as a device to
create a sense of exoticism that would maintain familiarity. Also evidenced in the
museum-like displays, Wilson demonstrates how the representation of black
bodies has created false notions of truth and authenticity for the historical
audience.

Figure 7 Film still from September Dream, 2003, each with four video monitors showing six-
minute extracts from four film performances of Othello and Otello. From Peter Erikson,
“Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson's "Speak of Me as I Am"

31
Wilson brings the representation of blackness to forefront of this work to
depict the historic al presence of the other in the collective European imaginary.
The work questions how false notions of representation are internalized as
stereotype and truth in contemporary Venetian/Western society. By allowing the
title Speak of Me as I Am to simultaneously refer to Othello, the African Diaspora,
Wilson himself, and the viewer he calls upon the viewer to look critically at how
their conception of blackness has been formed and continues to operate.
September Dream also calls for the viewer to become aware of how the
representation of race was used as a device to create otherness as a visual and
moral distinction within the play. In a contemporary post 9/11 setting, otherness
as a moral distinction has led to criminalization of dissent and Islam.
Wilson prompts viewers to be aware of his/her relationship to both the
historical ramifications of Othello and the distinctions she/he makes to form
identity is informed by social constructs. The process of identity formation is
reliant upon subjectivity and defining oneself by enforcing the boundaries of the
other, which is inextricably linked with social and cultural pressures.
55

Façade and Representation in Mary Kelly‟s Gloria Patri
Mary Kelly‟s work Gloria Patri (1992), which directly addressed identity
construction during war, was an installation that used mimicry in order to set up a

55
Elizabeth Grosz, “Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body,” in Feminist subjects, muliti-media:
Cultural Methodologies, ed. Penny Florence and Dee Reynolds (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995) 189.

32
scene of mastery only to undo it.
56
The installation was constituted by rows of
screen printed plates with fictional insignia created by compositing symbols from
military logos, two dimensional aluminum trophies topped by found figurines, and
uniform aluminum shields on which narratives of failed masculinity are inscribed.
The forms were deliberately intimidating, but upon closer inspection served to
reveal the pervasiveness of masculinity in a time of war and then to expose it as
a façade. Kelly describes the use of mimicry as Lacan does as it “reveals
something insofar as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is
behind it.”
57
The appearance of the shields asks the viewer to recognize their
own subjectivity, as their thinness reveals the fraud, while the text reveals the
fraud of intimidating spectacle. The narratives in the text as failed masculinity do
not come from war but of everyday life. Wilson uses the reversal of the scenes in
September Dream to draw attention to the construction of the representation of
blackness. Elizabeth Grosz states,
The ego is thus both a map of the body‟s surface and a
reflection of the image of the other‟s body. The other‟s
body provides the frame for the representation of one‟s
own. In this sense, the ego is an image of the body‟s
significance or meaning for the subject and for the
other. [Sic] It is thus as much a function of fantasy and
desire as it is a sensation and perception; it is a taking
over of sensation and perception by a fantasmatic
dimension. The significatory, cultural dimension implies
that bodies, egos, subjectivities are not simply
reflections of their cultural context and associated
values, but are constituted as such by them, marking

56
Mary Kelly, Imaging Desires, 183.
57
Mary Kelly, Imaging Desires, 183.

33
bodies in their „biological‟ configurations with
sociosexual inscriptions.
58

Wilson‟s reversal of the violence of the Desdemona‟s murder frame by frame is
an act to attempt to erase the final acts of the violence Othello enacts, thereby
erasing the legacy of linking blackness and violence. The reversal and slowing
each scene reveals the process of construction of the representation. As an act
of grieving, the erasure of violence in Othello not only poses the desire to avert
the tragedy of 9/11, but also expresses a desire to avert the perpetual villainy
attributed to the body of the other. The result marks the urgency of September
Dream as Erickson explains, “By welding the September 11 tragedy with the
unending sequence of other violences—physical, representational, and
epistemic—perpetuated upon the black body, Wilson invites us to mourn
September 11, as not an isolated event, as a one embedded in a historical matrix
marked by violence and crisis, but whose continued unfolding is, however not
inevitable.”
59
This interpretation recalls Leung‟s previously quoted statement in
which he suggests that a successful artwork does not isolate one war from other
wars or other economies of power, which for Wilson are the social constructions
of racial stereotypes and scapegoats.
Mary Kelly‟s work and writing of and around Gloria Patri are centered on
the role of perception, of failed masculinity, and absence and presence that can
also be explored in September Dream. In an interview with Douglas Crimp, Kelly

58
Elizabeth Grosz, “Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body,” 188.
59
Fred Wilson’s “Black Venezia”: Fictitious Histories and Notions of “Truth”,” 39.

34
states:
I felt the only spaces of identification that were allowed
were either over-identification with the victim or
projection of the Other into the realm of the abject. So,
in between those I wanted to reconsider another
position. I think of this visually in terms of the way the
spectator will negotiate her or her position in the
installation.
60

Mary Kelly‟s focus on the other within Gloria Patri thus becomes about the
viewer‟s intimate experience of the installation. Kelly attempts to challenge the
representation of otherness, by creating a space that requires “depth object of
imagination” to recognize her use of display and façade. By slowing and
reversing the films, Wilson reveals the process of constructing Othello as a
façade, once again making the viewer aware of his/her position as spectator.
Wilson‟s reversal of the scene can be understood as an attempt to isolate
the cultural norm to represent and replay the racial other with violence and
spectacle, in order to reject it. As a fantasy, albeit futile, Wilson appropriates the
fantasy of Othello to demonstrate how rejecting others from the body politic
works to form collective identity.
61
Like the representations of blackness in
Renaissance paintings, Wilson‟s use of Othello demonstrates how a
contemporary need to speak for others, continues to marginalize and eliminate
agency. The interplay between using the other to form subjectivity and as a

60
Douglas Crimp and Mary Kelly, Interview, in Mary Kelly (London: Phaidon, 1997), 29.
61
Wilson and Kathleen Goncharov, Speak of Me, 24.

35
political act, Wilson asks the viewer to consider his/her subjectivity and hit effects
the viewer‟s conception of the racial other, even as it relates to the artist.
By challenging the personal boundaries of subjectivity in order to react
against the rigid social categorizations of self and other, the abject can be
appropriated through performativity. Sandoval‟s description of Latino queer
identities can be applied to the marginalized identities in Wilson‟s work,
incorporating the silencing of Africans in Europe and expanded to the silenced
positions of Arabs and Muslims in the United States following 9/11.
While Turbulence II creates a physical embodiment of the disruption
foreign and familiar identity through the juxtaposition of the dizzying effect and
comfort of Safe House, September Dream also confuses the viewer‟s boundaries
of the rejected identity created for Othello and the role of social construction in
defining their own subjectivity. Together the works challenge the viewer to
confront social pressures involved in identity formation, and to acknowledge the
viewer‟s subjectivity as they experience the work. In her essay Hiroshima after
Iraq Deutsche looks to the role of psychoanalysis and war. Deutsche writes,
“Segal tied the social problem of destructiveness—of, that is, war—to the will to
preserve identity. Defending against anxiety, we project onto others the
aggression we fear in ourselves, a mechanism that in the national group, as in
the individual ego, both produces paranoia and allows the group to believe in its
own virtue.” Wilson therefore is harnessing both the personal and national
identity disorientation that resulted from 9/11 in an attempt to reject

36
righteousness of the body politic, and the acts of exclusion that function to
preserve stability.
Wilson‟s deliberate blurring of the stereotypical representation Africans
with personal subjective appropriation of their otherness challenges the idea of
“us versus them” and the demonization of otherness. Sandoval explains, “Once
expelled from the national body politic, the unclean and improper Other is
translated as an alien, as a monster, an excess or lack that provokes disgust,
anxiety, horror, and fear.”
62
Abjection relies on the repulsion of the other for a
collective consciousness but also is felt on an individual basis. Its existential
capacity questions identity as the basis of subjectivity and challenges the
boundaries of self and the relationship to the national body politic.
63
Wilson also
brings to the foreground how representation of others often acts to silence their
voice and is distinct from agency.
In Politicizing Abjection: In the Manner of a Prologue for the Articulation of
AIDS Latino Queer Identities” Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez argues that
performative abjection offers alternatives to the dominant ideologies because,
In doing so, to embrace abjection is to undo, in some
part, racism, shame, homophobia, and the fear of
death, allowing for a source of self-empowerment and a
liberating counterhegemonic force of bodies in revolt
that corporealize difference and heterogeneity with the
potential to never cease “challeng[ing their] master” (2)
with a boundary crisis, the instability of meaning, and
the disruption of order.
64

62
Ibid., 4.
63
Ibid., 7.
64
Ibid., 9.

37

The conflation of birth and death in Safe House II, the uncertainty present in
Turbulence, the allusion to 9/11 in September Dream causes the viewer to
participate with the content, their subjectivity activates the work. By blurring the
boundaries of self and other, Wilson urges the viewer to resist the tendency to
create representations of the other that function to alienate, demonize, and
ultimately to exclude these communities from having agency the public sphere.
Wilson‟s embrace of his uncertain identity reflects a feminist challenge to
hegemony because war, as Freud suggested, legitimates fantasies of heroic
masculinity predicated on invincibility, that disavows vulnerability.
65
It is through
Wilson‟s expression of vulnerability and doubt, and the questioning of his own
existence allowing the viewers a space for self-reflexivity that he challenges
hegemony, recalling that the personal is political.
Lastly, as a state of mind, Wilson uses the tenuous relationship of
Turbulence and September Dream to present a perspective that is not reliant
upon the gaze, but challenges the viewer understand their own acts of expulsion
to create others, and how society has and continues to construct social others
through marginalization in history that continues in the present day. The personal
nature and the intimacy created in Turbulence II, as reinforced by the overt ways
in which September Dream addresses race, blurs the boundaries of the viewer‟s
subjectivity with Wilson‟s. Safe House is refuge for both artist and viewer as

65
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” 5.

38
participant, allowing Wilson‟s own racial difference to be imbedded but not
spectacularized within the work.
Wilson asks viewers to modally imagine the other as an act of political
self-awareness, bringing the historical and contemporary presence of the racial
other to the center of the viewer‟s consciousness. The effect that Homi Bhabba
attributed to Gloria Patri can be used to unpack the interplay between Wilson‟s
Turbulence II and September Dream, stating, “In the installation…the body
seems to have been erased with this hard shiny metal surface, but then as you
negotiate that space, the body reappears and dramatizes the whole relation of
absence and presence.”
66
The body as object disappears for the first time in
Speak of Me in Turbulence II, emphasizing the role of the viewer‟s body as the
subject. It is the relationship of the viewer to the installation that completes it,
prioritizing an internal experience. The body reappears in September Dream,
once again as a representation of blackness where the viewer is asked to
recognize blackness as a site for projection that rejects an authentic agency. The
dramatization has the potential to make the viewer aware of their own projections
onto other bodies, and the difference between speaking and being spoken for.
Wilson‟s work suggests a continuous re-working of identity politics, in
which subjectivity is interwoven with the concrete political phenomena. The
tension of the simultaneous intrigue and expulsion of the other to form
subjectivity is inextricably connected the social pressures that shape greater

66
Homi Bhabba, “Focus” in Mary Kelly (Phaidon, 1997), 95.

39
cultural identity formation. The works by Piper and Kelly function as a means of
demonstrating the interconnections of aesthetics, politics, form, and subject and
how they internal psychic experience. By troubling assumptions about
dispassionate viewing, Wilson turns the viewer into embodied subjects.

40
Conclusion
As America‟s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be waged, in what
ways can a study of Wilson‟s investigation of subjectivity provide insight for later
works that continue to reflect upon subjectivity as means for political resistance?
Returning to the essay “Hiroshima after Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” Deutsche
argues that in order to understand the impact of war it is critical to look for the
role of individual subjectivity, which is often diminished by an emphasis of
collective identity. Subjectivity, she argues, reflects the contribution that
psychoanalysis and feminism have made to unpack the role of totalizing images
in producing and maintaining heroic facades of war-like subjects, as Kelly‟s
Gloria Patria did. Deutsche argues that contemporary impatient criticism instead
looks for a return to a traditional form of activism, creating a melancholic view of
an idealized past of political activism.
67
Deutsche describes the role of
melancholic criticism:
As a corollary of its impatience with feminism, which
has long insisted on the inseparability of the personal
and the political and on a politics concerned with
subjectivity, melancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide
the subjective and the material, the public and the
private, and the social and the psychical, as though war
has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no
work of the psyche in the waging of war.
68

The increased demand of maintaining the separation of the psychic formations of
self and the body politic suggests that rigid collective identity structures continue

67
Deutsche, Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” 5.
68
Ibid., 6.

41
to be reinforced by the façade of masculinity. The feminist stance that personal
is political remains to be an active approach of contemporary resistance, as
traditional forms of protest do not reflect specificity contemporary war. 9 Scripts
from a Nation at War (2007), the collaboration of artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon
Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, derived from the shared
sentiment that attending anti-war protests did not seem applicable to the current
war, as their positions seemed pre-determined and limited in the kind of political
speech available to them.
69

Based heavily in research and interviews, the nine-hour piece is a
response to the 2003 Iraq war that centered around the question, “How does war
construct specific positions for individuals to fill, enact, speak from, or resist?”
70
A
10-channel video project, the installation was initially shown at Documenta 12 in
Kassel, Germany, and later exhibited the Tate Modern and at various institutions
throughout the United States. Centered on a layered definition of scripting, the
artists fictionalized interviews by seamlessly editing fragments of thoughts,
speeches, blog posts, and transcripts together to create narratives from imagined
narratives from real positions to the war. By conflating the identities of both
imagined and real individuals with actors that stand in as representations of
subjectivities, 9 Scripts works to disrupt the boundaries of identity.

69
Public talk given at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, 9/17/09, accessed from
http://fora.tv/2007/09/17/9_Scripts_from_a_Nation_at_War#fullprogram on 1/06/10
70
Project Description, http://www.9scripts.info/

42
Like Turbulence II and September Dream, 9 Scripts raises issues of how
representation differs from agency. The artists, interested in positing the space of
self-representation as layered and complicated, explore the shift from writing
one‟s self to being written from the outside.
71
The figures in the work continually
and seamlessly shift identities, complicating the presumption that subjectivity and
the body are inextricably linked. While the words being spoken or written shift,
they actors express a multitude of positions including doubt, defiance, and fear.
The continuous construction and deconstruction of the figure‟s subjectivity is
reinforced by the disjunction between who is speaking, and whose words they
are speaking. Analyzing Silvia Kolbowski‟s After Hiroshima Mon Amour,
Deutsche recognizes a similar strategy employed in 9 Scripts in which the
asymmetry between actors and characters, and the asynchronies between text
and image cast identities into doubt. The uncertainty of the characters‟ identities
promotes less rigid projections and identifications from the viewer.
72

The methodology of 9 Scripts From a Nation at War is reminiscent of
Wilson‟s Turbulence and September Dream. First, the viewer‟s position as
spectator is exposed due the installation‟s format, which required the viewer to
edit their viewing by moving to other video clusters. The position as spectator is
also alluded to within different scripts as the videos pan out to reveal an audience
within the scene. Wilson did this initially with the museum displays he

71
Public talk given at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
72
Deutsche, “Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” 22.

43
constructed, as Gonzalez suggested, and again by beckoning the viewer to shift
their position from viewer to participant, reflecting upon his/her own uncertainty.
Next, 9 Scripts creates a façade of display in order to expose that facade.
Scripts are shown being rehearsed and repeated by different figures and actors
fill different roles on different screens. Wilson‟s museum display also achieves
this, and is evident in the use of Othello in September Dream, is Wilson‟s
choosing of versions in which Othello is played by white actors in blackface.
Blackness is thus revealed as façade, as it becomes a source of projection.
Lastly, 9 Scripts challenges the viewer to accept the destabilized
environment constructed by the fluidity of identities in which projections of identity
and body are not inextricably linked. In Turbulence II Wilson collapses slave
narratives, Othello, and his own narrative, allowing them to all speak visually and
aurally at once. A significant difference in the comparison is that what 9 Scripts
From a Nation at War achieves through the sequential narrative within the
videos, Wilson explores through metaphor. In 9 Scripts From a Nation at War,
Piper‟s Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma, and Kelly‟s Gloria Patria the artists‟
primary focus was to bring forth the viewer‟s self-awareness by creating works
that challenged the viewer to question his/her own processes of self-
identification. Wilson similarly articulates this position but he also does something
unique by making bare his own internal state of being, reflecting the vulnerability
and personal accountability of his own uncertainty.

44
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Gonzalez, Jennifer Stone, Fred Wilson, John Alan Farmer, Antonia Gardner, and
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Asset Metadata

Creator Juarez, Kristin D. (author)

Core Title Identity crisis: redefining the other in Fred Wilson's Speak of me as I am

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/13/2010

Defense Date 05/13/2010

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

Tag Fred Wilson,identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychoanalysis,public art,Venice Biennale

Place Name Italy (countries), USA (countries), Venice (Italy) (cities)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Bryan-Wilson, Julia (committee member), Decter, Joshua (committee member)

Creator Email kdjuarez@gmail.com,kdjuarez@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3084

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

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