Seeing differently
Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to
visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern
beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a “world picture”
expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after the Second World War in the art world and beyond.
This book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of
a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics)
and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse
that we are “beyond” or “post-” identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing
Differently critically examines how and why we “identify” works of art with an
expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are “post-identity”
given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about
who the subject “is,” and offers a new theory of how to think of this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.
Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a “queer
feminist durational” process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted
for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode
of relational interpretation that affects both “art” and “interpreter,” potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of
visual culture.
Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill Univer-
sity in Montréal. Her recent publications include major essays on Marina Abramović
(in The Drama Review TDR), on feminist art and curating, and on performance art
histories, as well as the edited volume Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003,
2010). Her most recent book is Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006), and her major volume, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in
History, co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, is due out in 2012.
Seeing differently
A history and theory of identification
and the visual arts
Amelia Jones
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Amelia Jones
The right of Amelia Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Amelia.
Seeing differently : a history and theory of identification and the visual arts / Amelia Jones. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Identity (Philosophical concept) in art. 2.Visual perception in art. 3. Arts, Modern. 4. Aesthetics,
Modern. I. Title. II. Title: Identification, contemporary art, and visual culture.
NX650.I35J66 2012
701’.18 – dc23
2011037036
ISBN: 978-0-415-54382-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-54383-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-14681-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans
by MapSet Ltd, Gateshead, UK
... to Paul, whose identifications are myriad and always in process,
soliciting myriad open-ended identifications in return ...
… why would the problem of identification not be, in general,
the essential problem of the political?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, from
“Transcendence Ends in Politics,”
Typography, 1982
CONTENTS
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1
ix
xv
xvii
Introduction: the leaking frame of the argument on how to
see differently
1
2
Art as a binary proposition; identity as a binary proposition
17
3
Fetishizing the gaze and the anamorphic perversion:
“the other is you”
63
4
Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and “post-identity”
117
5
Queer feminist durationality: time and materiality as a means of
resisting spatial objectification
170
Seeing and reconceiving difference: concluding thoughts,
without final conclusions
218
6
Index
245
List of figures
0.1
0.2
0.3
1.1
1.2
2.1
2.2
Obama and Clinton Square Off in Texas Debate, 2008.
Photograph by Ben Sklar. Courtesy of Getty Images.
xix
A handout photo of Jean Charles de Menezes and Hussain Osman’s
(left half) faces placed together and shown at the Stockwell Health
and Safety prosecution at the Central Criminal Court in London
October 2, 2007. Caption read: “‘Shocking and catastrophic’ blunders by
London’s police force led to the killing of the innocent Brazilian man,
Menezes, shot dead on a train by officers who had mistaken him for
Osman, a suicide bomber, a court heard on Monday.”
REUTERS/Metropolitan Police/Handout (BRITAIN).
xxi
Hillside Highschool yearbook cover, Durham, North Carolina, 1977
(a photograph of a 16-year-old “Amy” (Amelia) Jones can be found
on page 92 of the yearbook).
xxii
Lorna Simpson, Guarded Conditions, 1989; 18 color polaroids, plastic
letters, 21 engraved plastic plaques; 231 x 333 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Salon94, New York, © Lorna Simpson.
8
Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features /
Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features, 1998; silkscreen
on canvas, two panels: 120 x 40 inches (304.8 x 101.6 cm) each.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © Glenn Ligon.
11
Peter Robinson, Untitled (“percentage” painting), 1993; wax,
bitumen, paint, oil stick, seven canvases, 1010 x 835 x 5845 cm.
19
Courtesy of The Fletcher Trust Collection, © Peter Robinson.
Keith Piper, The Body Politic, 1982; mixed media on hinged wooden
frame, 4 x 6’. Courtesy of the artist. (Original lost; scan from Mirage:
Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire catalogue [London: Institute
33
of Contemporary Art, 1995].)
x List of Figures
Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1863; oil on canvas, 1.3 x 2.25
meters. Collection Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
3.2 Algerian postcard with the label “Jeune Mauresque et Femme Kabyle,”
as reproduced in Malek Alloula’s book The Colonial Harem, 1981.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
3.3 Screen shot of home page of “Sultan’s Harem,” downloaded August 7,
2011 from http://curioshop.fisheseye.com/sultan_harem.htm.
3.4 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1979; black and white photograph,
10 x 8 inches, edition of 10. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
3.5 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Surveillance is Your Busywork), billboard
for Film in the Cities, Minneapolis, 1985. Courtesy Mary Boone
Gallery, New York, © Barbara Kruger.
3.6 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with Slave, 1842; oil
on canvas, 76 x 105 cm. Collection Walters Museum, Baltimore.
Photograph © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
3.7 Feet of Christ stroked and worn away, in Saint Joseph’s Oratory,
Montréal. Photograph © Amelia Jones, 2011.
3.8 Plaque and heart of “Frère André,” who became Saint André in 2010;
André founded Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montréal. Photograph
© Amelia Jones, 2011.
3.9 Sketch of perspectival grid based on Alberti’s 1435 theory, from
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, La due regole della perspectiva practico
(Rome, 1583), p. 55. Courtesy University of Chicago Library,
Special Collections Research Center.
3.10 Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selves
(The Ambassadors), 1533; oil on oak, 207 x 209.5 cm. Collection
The National Gallery, London.
3.11 Martha Wilson, Posturing, 1972; color photograph, 10 x 8 in.
Photograph Doug Waterman. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W.
Gallery, New York.
3.12 Martha Wilson, Posturing: Male Impersonator (Butch), 1973; color
photograph, 10 x 8 in. Photograph Richards Jarden.
Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.
3.13 Martha Wilson, Lesbian, from A Portfolio of Models, 1974;
black and white photograph, 10 x 8 in. Photograph Victor Hayes.
Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.
3.14 Renée Cox, Yo Mama, 1993; gelatin silver print, 99 ½ x 63 ½ in.
Courtesy of the artist.
3.15 Renée Cox, Venus Hottentot, 1995; black and white photograph.
Courtesy of the artist.
3.16 Renée Cox, Black Leather Lace Up, 2001; originally a color
photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
3.17 Renée Cox, Yo Mama at Home, 2001; gelatin silver print, 48 x 48 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
3.1
64
66
67
70
71
73
76
77
82
85
89
91
92
94
95
96
97
List of Figures xi
3.18 William Pope.L, I get paid to rub mayo on my body aka how much is
that nigger in the window, 1991; photograph documenting a
performance. New York. Courtesy of the artist and Franklin Furnace.
99
3.19 William Pope.L, Member aka Schlong Journey, 1996.
Photograph Lydia Grey. New York. The Reassurance Project (My penis
is fine, how are you?), 1996. Layout by Alice Design Communication:
Charles B. Melcher and Margo Halverson, Portland, ME. Courtesy
100
of the artist and Alice Design Communication.
3.20 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Instant Identity Ritual, screengrab from
YouTube, downloaded June 10, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/
102
watch?v=fIfAk-guplA; attributed to Gustavo Vasquez.
3.21 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra (including
Roberto Sifuentes), Temple of Confessions installed, 2005.
104
Photograph courtesy La Pocha Nostra.
4.1 Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (overture),
or Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members), 1993
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; metal and
enamel paint, 12 x 15 in. / 30.5 x 38.1 cm. Collection of Michael
Brenson. Photograph courtesy of the artist and the Simon Preston
120
Gallery, New York.
4.2 Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, 1991–93;
91 offset prints, 11 ½ x ½ inches (29.2 x 29.2 cm) each, framed,
78 text pages 5 ¼ x 7 ¼ inches (12.2 x 18.4 cm) each, framed.
Shown in an installation view of Glenn Ligon: AMERICA,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 10–June 5, 2011.
126
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Glenn Ligon.
4.3 Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, 1991–93, detail.
130
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Glenn Ligon.
4.4 Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in Polyester Suit, 1980.
134
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
4.5 Installation view of Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in
Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, November 10, 1994–March 10, 1995.
139
Photograph Geoffrey Clements.
4.6 Installation view of Freestyle, Studio Museum, Harlem, New York,
2005. Photograph by Adam Reich. Courtesy the Studio Museum in
141
Harlem, New York.
4.7 Sue Williams, The Artworld Can Suck My Proverbial Dick, 1992;
acrylic and enamel on canvas, 60 x 68 inches (152.4 x 172.7 cm),
143
SW114. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York, © Sue Williams.
4.8 Installation view of In a Different Light, University of California,
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, January 11–April 9,
1995.
145
xii List of Figures
Rachel Garfield, So You Think You Can Tell, 2000; 26 minutes,
two-channel video installation, showing two channels in one still image.
Courtesy of the artist.
151
4.10 Photograph of queer Toronto collective, Still Fierce, Still Strugglin’, 2011;
screengrab of profile image from Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/
media/set/?set=a.180191915369060.57910.180190985369153,
accessed August 7, 2011.
154
5.1 VALIE EXPORT, Genital Panic, 1969; photograph of performative act. 171
5.2 Magdalena Abakanowicz, Studium Faktur, 1964; sisal, 150 x 100 cm,
179
variable. Photograph © Tom Grotta, 2010.
5.3 VA and Tutt, Snatch, 2010; bed sheets, household linens, 66 x 45 inches.
181
Collection Dr. Jane Chin Davidson.
5.4 Judy Chicago, Georgia O’Keeffe plate, from The Dinner Party, 1979;
painted porcelain, diameter approximately 14 in. Courtesy of
182
Through the Flower.
5.5 Judy Chicago, Domes, c. 1969; sprayed acrylic laquer inside layers
of clear acrylic, each dome 12.2 cm diameter, displayed on a
185
mirrored square 38 x 38 cm. Collection Amelia Jones.
5.6 Duchamp, Objet dard, 1951, original in galvanized plaster and lead;
cast in bronze in 1962, 78 x 197 x 90 mm. Courtesy of TATE
London, © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and
186
DACS, London 2011.
5.7 Marcel Duchamp, Female Fig Leaf, 1950, original in galvanized
plaster; cast in bronze in 1961, 90 x 137 x 125 mm. Courtesy of
TATE London, © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris
187
and DACS, London 2011.
5.8 Sanja Iveković, Trokut (Triangle), 1979; photographs and text
190
documenting performance. Courtesy of the artist.
5.9 Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994; oil on linen, 12 x 16 inches.
195
Photograph John Berens. Courtesy of the artist.
5.10 Mira Schor, “Cunt,” 1993; oil on linen, 12 x 16 inches.
196
Photograph Sarah Wells. Courtesy of the artist.
5.11 Paul Donald, Gatling, 2011. Spray painted wood, 40 x 32 x 18 in.
198
Courtesy of the artist.
5.12 Paul Donald, Culverin (duckyvulture), 2010. Spray painted wood,
200
11 x 11 x 5 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist.
5.13 Paul Donald, Mr. Mortargnome, 2011. Spray painted wood,
12 x 7 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist.
202
5.14 Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004; chromogenic print,
40 x 32 inches (101.6 x 81.3 cm), edition of 8, 2 AP.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.
205
5.15 Catherine Opie, Bo from Being and Having, 1991; chromogenic
print, 17 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm), edition of 8, 2 AP.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.
206
4.9
List of Figures xiii
5.16 Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Pervert, 1994; chromogenic print,
40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm), edition of 8, 2 AP.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.
5.17 Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993; chromogenic print,
40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm), edition of 8, AP.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.
5.18 Catherine Opie, Dyke, 1993; chromogenic print, 40 x 30 inches
(101.6 x 76.2 cm), edition of 8, 2 AP.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.
6.1 Ghazel, Venus, still from Me, 1997–2000; single image from a
three-channel video installation, © Ghazel and ADAGP.
6.2 Caster Semenya on the cover of YOU magazine, September 10, 2009.
Dino Codevilla, YOU Magazine.
208
209
210
224
231
Acknowledgments
Seeing Differently feels like the book I have been writing all my life.
It seems like a lifetime ago I sat with Natalie Foster, my editor, at a vegetarian
café in Manchester spieling out the premise of this book—wobbly yet grandiose in
aim, my plan was inchoate but fired by a sense of imperative. I am deeply grateful to
Natalie for standing behind this idea and patiently awaiting its exposition.
University of California, Riverside and University of Manchester provided early
gestating points for the book. In 2009, my colleagues in Art History and Communication Studies offered me a fantastic job at McGill and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council, Canada, generously offered me extensive research support, which helped in the completion of this project, including affording
funds to hire fantastic research assistants: Lauren Diez d’Aux,Will Lockett, Elizabeth
Maynard, and Abi Shapiro. Thanks especially to Liz for patiently and with cheer
obtaining all images and rights, and to Abi for copyediting the manuscript.
Key interlocutors read and commented on all or part of this manuscript and
gave me the courage to proceed: Catherine Desbarats, Jennifer Doyle, Rachel Garfield, Caroline Jones, Jonathan Katz, and Alpesh Patel. My colleagues at McGill
offered general support and lots of fascinating debates about Québécois identity
and issues of faith, including in particular Ara Osterweil, Christine Ross, and Laila
Parsons, and Angela Vanhaelen provided great advice on early modern subjectivity.
AnnMarie Adams at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at
McGill, Laura Doan, Jackie Stacey, and other organizers of the Queer Up North
Festival and the University of Manchester summer school, and Iwona Blaswick at
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, took risks and invited me to present this work—
in the latter case, in very early, nascent form. I am grateful to the audiences for
those events as well, and many others interlocutors in audiences over the years
during which I have been wrestling with aspects of this project through public presentations. These include especially audiences at the Courtauld Institute in
xvi Acknowledgements
London, University of Poznan, University of Cork, University of Florida Gainesville, University of Lancaster, University of Southern Denmark, and Rice University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Of course I could not have written this book without all the discussions and
debates I have engaged in over the years, with colleagues, friends, and even intellectual adversaries. I am particularly grateful to the kids I went to school with in
Durham who were willing to confront our differences and address me directly as
a member of the oppressor class, who was nonetheless somewhat naive, and to my
parents and my neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Cook, who, as my employers (I babysat for
their kids in the mid-1970s) and friends of the Martin Luther King family, taught
me how to understand this address and respectfully engage with rather than run
from it. My mother, Ginnie Jones, has supported me always through my sometimes
frantic attempts to center myself, and continues to be an inspiration to me as she
responds to the massive global changes that have rocked her world since she was
born in 1925, a gazillion technological lifetimes ago. She adjusts, not without complaining, but she survives.
Students and colleagues over the years have hashed out issues of identity politics
and identification with me, from David Alderson, Roberto Bedoya, Lisa Bloom,
Jane Chin-Davidson, Kevin Dalton-Johnson, Laura Doan, Angela Harutyunyan,
Combiz Moussavi, Lisa Newman, Monica Pearl, Erin Silver, Christine Stoddard,
Samine Tabatabaie, James Thompson, and Rob Wisnovsky, and, to the many, many
artist friends from whom I have learned how to think about identification as process, including Laura Aguilar, Ron Athey, Nao Bustamante, Heather Cassils,Vaginal
Davis, Shezad Dawood, Harry Gamboa, Ken Gonzalez-Day, Gronk, Janez Jansa (aka
Emil Hrvatin), Dominic Johnson, Suzanne Lacy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ming Ma,
Carolee Schneemann, Susan Silton,Tina Takemoto, Faith Wilding, Patssi Valdez, and
of course all the artists whose work I address in the book. And my dearest friends,
Toni, Joanna, Jennifer,Vanessa, Laila, Susan, and my yoga mentor, Paul C., you have
kept my identifications circulating around something I can at least recognize.Without you I would only be “decentered”; one has to perform some kind of grounding,
after all.
A special thanks to my students at the University of Manchester and McGill
University, the two sites where I worked out in the most serious way the material
central to Seeing Differently. In each case it was the students who taught me the most
about the particular permutations of identification at hand in the new cultures into
which I was attempting to integrate. They were patient of my failures to do so.
If my students have taught me about identifying in foreign cultures, Evan and
Vita, my children, have provided the only unmoving anchors throughout the past
decade of immense change as I have moved across three different world cultures.
Thank heavens for you, my dear ones! Thanks to you, too, for continuing to change
as people, resisting in the best way my attempts to “identify” you, while remaining
always here in my life. And to Paul, for joining us here in this whirlwind of identifications. What would I do without you three?
Prologue
Just because you’re our color, doesn’t make you
our kind
(How) is identity visible? Why does it matter so much to us how others look? What
conditions and informs the way we identify other people (including images of
them) visually? Is the notion of “identity” (a modern concept of European origin
after all) enough to understand how we attribute meaning to other people and their
images? How do we name what we think we see in bodies and images around us and
how do we give this named quality meaning and value?1
In a 2007 public event at historic African-American Hampton University in
Virginia, Reverend Al Sharpton, the notoriously polemical (some might say divisive) activist for African-American rights, made the pointed comment “just because
you’re our color doesn’t make you our kind.”2 While not mentioning then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama by name, given that Obama had just announced
his candidacy it was clear to all in the audience whom he had in mind. Sharpton’s
point, as he elaborated it, was that African Americans should vote for candidates
standing up for their interests (whatever these may be, and who gets to decide what
they are, he did not say) rather than candidates who “look” black. As this quote has
circulated widely in publications and interviews, it has largely been presented as
proof of a schism in the US black community and as proof that African Americans
judge “African Americanness” not purely on the basis of visible appearance (“our
color”) but on the basis of more complex ideas about belonging (“our kind”).3
Color (visible difference) versus kind (internal, true identity). Here we find the
key structure of belief about how people identify active in US culture—and active in
parallel ways in other European and European-based (or Euro-American) cultures
since at least the end of the Second World War. It is the contention of this book, which
adopts in some cases the problematic label “Western” to short-hand the dominant
belief systems of these cultures, that this structure of belief is absolutely pervasive: that
people “appear” a certain way, can be visually identified and thus given meaning or
positioned in the social order, and yet, that this meaning can at any moment betray
xviii Prologue
the “truth” of an internal, authentic identity (“kind”). We simultaneously cling to a
belief in the veracity of visual signifiers to convey the truth of who people are and
consistently doubt what these signifiers convey.
Before proceeding, a word on terms. I have already gotten myself tied in knots,
given my overall desire to point to, expose, and rethink binaries and labels linked
to various identifications—to move away from the category-think of classic identity politics. After much thought I have had to acknowledge that there is no way
around reiterating the binaries and some of the labels I will hope to complicate—
for example, the term Western will have to do in order to indicate dominant ideas
coming out of my primary areas of study, the US, Canada, the UK, and to a lesser
degree France, other parts of Europe, and in some cases New Zealand and Australia; I try to be clear in each case to which cultures I am referring. In some cases I
will use the slightly more specific “Euro-American,” usually when I am referring
to debates located in the US, the UK, and continental Europe. And I will try to
indicate when the labelling fails—for, after all, countries and societies located in
Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America, and beyond have been intimately
interconnected to European culture for at least a thousand years of travel, trade, and
communications—it will always be a spurious gesture to some degree to pretend
otherwise. “Western” liberalism, for example, was formulated in relation to knowledge of “other” systems; notions of freedom, agency, and will, perhaps with other
names and inflections, are not unique to “Western” culture; “Western” secularism
was molded in relation to legacies of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other religious practices; and so on.
Sometimes this use of Western will lead to the even more problematic negative of “non-Western,” which I use advisedly to indicate from a Euro-American
view its projection of what it is “not”—precisely, in the logic of colonialism, the
non-Western “other.” The upside of this shorthanding is that it is both historically
accurate, inasmuch as the self-construction of the West is precisely what is in question in this book as a whole, and allows me to avoid continually specifying complex
cultural loci such as “countries whose dominant cultures are based on European
traditions,” which, indeed, is largely what I mean by “Western” here. The caveat is
that, of course, we cannot really generalize what “European traditions” are but, as I
will be working through some specific philosophies coming out of the Renaissance
and Enlightenment, I hope my particular take on this will be clear.
As well, I accept statistics from national censuses and common parlance in art
discourse based on particular commonly accepted categories of racial identification,
although (if I were to argue the point explicitly) I would never accept race as anything but a cultural construct. As with the term Western, to some degree my use of
categories is purely descriptive and about perceptions and prescriptive logic—and
thus can be justified on those lines. Still, the shorthanding does reinforce certain
oversimplifying ideas about identity that in the end I am bent on challenging. The
point in using a term such as “black” is not to imagine or imply that we know
what it means (per Sharpton’s assumptions) but to indicate it as a culturally relevant
term, with different meanings depending on who is using and thinking it, which
Prologue xix
Figure 0.1 Obama and Clinton Square Off in Texas Debate, 2008.
Photograph by Ben Sklar. Courtesy of Getty Images.
reciprocally taps into and molds perceptions about where the person comes from
and who they “are.”
My choice of terms throughout provides a far from perfect solution to the
problem of language, which to some degree reiterates what it seeks (in this case)
to critique or at least put in plain view for analysis. Such shorthanding is necessary
given the complexity of the terrain I trace here, but I deploy it nervously and with
knowledge of the limitations arising from the very concept of a homogeneous
Western culture, or of race, or what have you—limitations I will indicate at every
turn.4
We are not “post” identity
Indeed, the 2007–08 Democratic presidential primary in the US—which pitted
Obama, the first viable black presidential candidate in US history, against Hilary
Clinton, the first viable female presidential candidate in US history—brought to
the fore the volatility of terms indicating identifications, the absolutely central role
of beliefs about identity (particularly race, class, and gender), and the visible register
on which these beliefs tend to circulate, in the continuing navigation of political
and everyday life in the US and beyond.5 The primary took place and was covered by journalists, pundits, and scholars in ways that continually reinscribed the
centrality of ideas about gender, race, and class in shaping our understanding of
other people, the world around us, and the choices we make.
xx Prologue
It is thus doubly ironic that this election took place during the supposed “postidentity” phase of Euro-American culture, so proclaimed with increasing regularity
since the early 1990s, with the first appearance of magazine and newspaper articles
staging the death of feminism via a discussion of the rise of “post-feminism,” about
which I will say much more in Chapter 4. Essays, exhibitions, and broad-based
arguments followed, proclaiming “post-black” and “post-queer” culture in both
European and US contexts. In the art world, “post” identity rhetoric has had a
particularly robust role in reshaping art trends after the rise (and fall?) of identity
politics since the 1970s. With a raft of articles proclaiming post-feminist aesthetics
in the 1990s and exhibitions such as the 2001 Freestyle, a show of work by AfricanAmerican artists and hosted by the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), which
was nonetheless marketed in the catalogue and press as post-black, post-identity
rhetoric, paralleling anxious rhetoric of the pressures of “political correctness,” has
dominated the US social scene for 20 years.6 Relegating identity politics to the
past, post-identity rhetoric functions to obscure 50 years of intense struggle on
the part of civil rights, feminist, and other activists operating under the premises of
twentieth-century identity politics to claim and act on coalitional identifications in
order to produce social change.
The writing of this book was first and foremost motivated by a sense of outrage
at these facile proclamations that we are “beyond” identity—proclamations that
are either based, as with the Freestyle exhibition, on a frustration with some of the
simplifications and binaries of conventional 1970s-style identity politics and on a
desire for publicity, or are made by those oblivious to the history of identity politics and activisms of the past that have enabled whatever freedoms are had in the
present.7 Either way, such arguments insultingly (and dangerously) overlook the
continuing systematic violence perpetrated against a vast range of subjects across
the world based on their presumed identities—largely as based on visible cues—and
the stereotypes attached to these. Thousands of examples of this violence could
be sketched here, but just one makes the point clearly: in 2005, just after the July
bombings on London transit vehicles, Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man
working in London, was murdered by the London police, who targeted him because they mistakenly identified him as an Arab terrorist. As art historian Alpesh
Patel has noted, this murder, based on the visual misrecognition of Menezes, paralleled
a disturbing number of similar murders of innocent Americans of supposed “Arab”
appearance in 2001 just after the events of 9/11.8
All over the world, people are still dying, being stoned, mutilated, raped, crippled,
their opportunities stifled, treated like second-class citizens, and/or suffering in prisons or isolated ghettos, with substandard living conditions, because of how they are
“identified.” This recognition—which is evident every single day even just in mainstream UK, US, French, and Canadian news coverage, to stick with my primary sites
of analysis—fuels the outrage underlying my attempt to take on post-identity rhetoric. In the face of claims on the right and left in Western discourse, from journalism
to academic scholarship, that our culture is somehow “beyond” identity—with issues of identity politics often directly or implicitly dismissed as outmoded in an era
Prologue xxi
Figure 0.2 A handout photo of Jean Charles de Menezes and Hussain Osman’s (left
half) faces placed together and shown at the Stockwell Health and Safety prosecution
at the Central Criminal Court in London October 2, 2007. Caption read: “‘Shocking
and catastrophic’ blunders by London’s police force led to the killing of the innocent
Brazilian man, Menezes, shot dead on a train by officers who had mistaken him for
Osman, a suicide bomber, a court heard on Monday.”
REUTERS/Metropolitan Police/Handout (BRITAIN).
of globalized multiculturalism via a rubric of “post” (feminism, queer, black, etc.)—
this book contends that issues of identification (how we identify the bodies we see,
whether in representation or in real time and “live”) still guide and even overdetermine every experience we have in the contemporary world.
Before I go on in the Introduction to trace how I will examine the role of identifications in determining meaning and value in the visual arena (particularly in the
visual arts), it seems crucial, given the importance I am placing on identifications, to
outline my own. I hope it will become clear in this way why I take the political
stance I do, and set the stage for how this political stance informs the particular history and theory of the contemporary confluence of structures of identification and
visual culture that I elaborate in this book.
A life beyond binaries?
Like, I imagine, many people in our newly globalized, networked, diasporic world,
I have never felt I belonged in the contexts in which I have found myself. I have
never fit into proper binary categories of identification, although I have often tried
(articulating myself, for example, as a “feminist art historian” to ensure a particular
positionality within academia).
Figure 0.3 Hillside Highschool yearbook cover, Durham, North Carolina, 1977
(a photograph of a 16-year-old “Amy” (Amelia) Jones can be found on page 92 of
the yearbook).
Prologue xxiii
I grew up a white middle-class girl in the American South, in Durham, North
Carolina, with parents who were good Second World War-era “Roosevelt liberals”—both born in the 1920s in the Midwest. In 1970 the US government finally
succeeded in forcing North Carolina to integrate its public schools and, accordingly, I was bussed across town from my nice little “white” neighborhood elementary school in Durham, with its acres of playground and groomed buildings, to the
“black” school across town—on a barren patch of land, the buildings glorified salt
boxes. A few years later, I was bussed to Hillside High, the even less elegant formerly “black” high school, which did not have enough land to host a regulation
sized 100-yard track, and was still (due to “white flight” to private schools) about
90 percent black. I was attending Hillside when Roots, based on Alex Haley’s tale
of his family’s exodus from Africa on slave ships to the American South and their
systematic oppression as slaves, came on television and explosively detonated what
little reserve and sense of passivity remained in the black community in Durham. I
got smacked about a bit by pissed off black school mates (sometimes because I was
a goody goody and would tell them to be quiet in class, other times just because
they were angry), unfortunately favored by black and white teachers alike for my
academic achievements (including one horrible white librarian who locked the
black kids out of the library while nurturing my reading habits), invited to parties
on the other side of town by both poor and middle-class black friends, laughed at
during the prom for not being able to dance (I was only one of two white people),
coached by black teammates in running distance events, and generally given a lesson in identity politics that was skewed, unique, and yet prototypical of certain parts
of the US during this period.
Mentored by my parents and by my African-American neighbors, one of whom
had been Martin Luther King’s roommate in college, I knew I was both of the
dominant and privileged social class in the US as a whole and, in the context of
my school, a persona non grata. I was both hyper visible as a symbol of the ruling
class, yet a semi-outcast. I belonged wholly to the dominant culture, but I didn’t
belong at all to the only social group that matters for a teenager—her cohort of
fellow students. I desperately wanted to belong in any one of the black cultural
communities at my school (the sexy jocks; the artsy kids; the brains, who were accused by some fellow students of betraying their race by being high achievers). But
dressing in polyester pantsuits, wearing vinyl wedgies, and listening to Earth, Wind,
and Fire as I did assiduously was not going to convince my classmates that I was (as
Sharpton puts it) “our kind”—but in this case, precisely because I was so clearly,
visibly, not “our color.”9
This was an adventure that has shaped my politics and my own identifications.
Being a girl, interestingly, was incidental to all this, except for the fact that the soft
violence directed towards me was different in intensity from that directed at my
older brother. Generally, black kids were still afraid to hurt a white girl in the 1970s
(although among themselves, there were some fierce fights between some of the
more aggressive black girls). As for other differences, in the American South nothing mattered but white and black. Jewish kids were seen as white. The one South
xxiv Prologue
Asian boy simply didn’t “read” socially and kids on both “sides” spent a lot of time
trying to place him, mostly through a kind of passive racism involving rude comments that, for once, bonded the white and black kids in mutual understanding.
Class, this being the US, was not acknowledged as a factor, but was in fact, as it
continues to be, paramount in the way in which racial differentiations played out
(there was, in fact, an “other side of the tracks,” and I was from it). Being gay was
simply an invisible condition, without name, as the gay and lesbian rights movement had not hit North Carolina primary and secondary schools at this point, but
I will never forget R.R., the large black young man in my home economics class
who sewed himself a giant pink polyester pant suit. Whether or not he was gay, he
was very queer. R.R. stood out and everyone loved him.
I went from Durham to the Northeast for university and jobs, and then to Los
Angeles to finish my PhD and for my first academic job, where I learned that US
race politics (which, I was starting to see, are always/already class politics) were
not just black and white but brown and other shades too. I had to be reminded by
my Chicano students that so-called Mexicans (native Americans and mestizos) had
lived in the area now called California for eons before the whites came.10 I taught
in the publicly funded University of California system.
Taking up a new job in 2003, I moved mid-career from Los Angeles, a hotbed
of overtly negotiated identity politics with a legacy of political and art-world activism, to Manchester, UK, where I was astounded by the blatant, in-your-face,
daily pressure of British class politics (particularly starkly drawn in post-industrial,
semi-gentrified Manchester, the city where Marx and Engels conspired to elaborate
their radical class critique, and where race riots in the early 1980s had scarred the
area near the university). Outlying areas, such as Oldham, which had been prosperous mill towns, were derelict ghettos filled primarily with very poor white people
struggling to survive.11 South Manchester, where I lived, was privileged and, depending on the area, genteel or had bohemian pretensions, as well as being very left
wing and having artsy ambitions, with its own film series and arts festival.
In Manchester I also learned again, in a different way, about not belonging, this
time by voice: I appeared to be “English” (as in: white, middle class, constituting
the ever-entrenched idea of Britishness) but when I would open my mouth this
misrecognition would be exposed. I would suddenly be recognized as foreign. I felt
my outlandishness, my not belonging, every minute of every day.
“Color” versus “kind”: was I visually “like” those who represented Britishness
(usually as middle class and English) or was I completely foreign (sounding)? Like
them in color, I felt vastly different in kind: loud, emotional, direct, inappropriate,
American. And “American” reads in very, very conflicted ways in post-Thatcher
Britain—with Tony Blair in power most of the time I was there reinforcing his
“special relationship” with George W. Bush, the tendency for the government to
look yearningly to the US as a model, but for people on the ground to excoriate
our culture and dismiss our mode of “democracy,” was at an all-time high. Blair’s
sycophancy to the US “war on terror” President Bush was hard for everyone, including me, to take.
Prologue xxv
In every way, identity reads totally differently in the UK from the US, pivoting in
obvious ways around accent as a code for class status, with race (itself coded directly
in terms of the question of British imperialism and colonialism) obviously a factor
but ignored as a political issue by most whites, no matter how “left” in politics.12
Why, British friends and acquaintances would ask me with total bafflement, are
Americans so obsessed with race? (Why, I would think, do British people imagine
race isn’t a factor in British life? And why are they so obsessed with class?)
Finally, in 2009 I moved to Québec, Montréal style. Cosmopolitan, bilingual in
practice but francophone by law. Montréal is nominally majority white, but whiteness becomes racialized and class-identified through language difference—francophones and anglophones are effectively different “races” in the context of Montréal
and Québec in general. Often, I find anglophone Canadian attitudes towards
francophones overtly racist and classist; and some francophones aren’t too fond of
anglophones either (as a phantasmagorical group identity, fixed in their cultural
imaginary), identifying anglophones with centuries of British-style oppression.13
From my experience living in the South, I am familiar with this feeling of being
identified as part of the culture of the oppressors, benefitting from being white/
anglophone, while not actually linked historically to the specific oppressors.14 Here,
again, I seem to belong in color but definitely not in kind. Among other things, my
spoken French is crippled, and my French accent a strange faux Parisian taught by a
black North Carolinian who had certainly never left the Durham area—an accent
that does not translate well in Québec.When I open my mouth, francophones tend
to pity me. I don’t, apparently, speak French like a “native” anglophone (certainly
less well than most, and with a different accent), not to mention having the vocabulary of an eight year old. Life in Montréal makes explicit the way in which language
and accent (linked to class, racial/ethnic, and religious cultures) are crucial signifiers
in how one identifies, and is identified, particularly in the twenty-first century, and
that these are tied inexorably to what we still recognize as racial, ethnic, and class
differentiations—not to mention to explicit social connections and institutions.
One of my children speaks with a Mancunian public (“comprehensive”) school
accent, with inflections of what working-class white kids in Manchester believe to
be a hip Jamaican/Rastafarian patois. My other child speaks with an accent characterized by a bizarre range of inflections: Los Angeles valley girl (largely from Disney
television rather than from her own early three and a half years there), Manchester
working class, BBC English, and now Canadian anglophone (with French inflections). My husband speaks “New Zealand” and is learning to speak French with
Québécois accent. As for my accent when speaking English, even Americans find
it baffling.
We are all by visible appearances a conventional, heteronormative nuclear family (albeit split and reconfigured), white and middle class. But who we “are” I really have no idea. I find my sense of identification continually shifting depending
on where I am living and who my children have decided, for the moment, to
be. Sometimes the relationality of my sense of identification is almost too much,
and I yearn for a belief in my own (even momentary or potential) coherence.
xxvi Prologue
I come from a place of deep understanding of the urge to cohere oneself—being
an outsider or feeling the incursion of “difference” is a scary thing. But I react very
strongly against the desire to cohere at the cost of those around—projecting anxieties outward, as psychoanalytic models would have it, in order to make yourself feel
more secure.15
As for gender, I started my career as a feminist (more explicitly, with the hidden
agenda of the “straight white feminist”), wholly invested in the truisms of feminist
psychoanalytical models of analyzing visual art and film and yet (bizarrely, given my
background) forgetting the crucial role of my own “whiteness” in my experience
and understanding of gender, as well as the privileges I experienced as an apparently straight white women benefitting from living in a heterosexual nuclear family
matrix. I was in my early publishing career unable to articulate or theorize the role
these normative aspects of my apparent identifications played in my own social
positionality and in the way in which I experienced my gender.
Now, at the age of 50, and having lived in two foreign countries, I cannot imagine experiencing my gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, or state of
bodily readiness as anything but insecure and contingent. I admit that I hardly know
what to think about where I belong as a sexual being in the world, particularly now
that my family and friends encompass a range of cross-identified hetero-, bi-, trans-,
and polysexuals of all apparent colors, classes, nationalities, religious identifications,
and levels of able-bodiedness. That is to say, of all apparent “kinds.”
At this point, perhaps midway through my life’s work, I am embarrassed by the
myopia of my early feminist art historical work. I thought I knew who I was at the
beginning of my career as an academic. But, with this little, and of course completely partial and self-drawn, sketch, the confusion attending my current sense of
“identity” (my identifications, which shift continually as I navigate across cultures)
is laid bare. To reiterate my point above: after living in three different white dominant “first-world” cultures,16 speaking two different languages (three if you count
the striking Mancunian English accent and vocabulary), and living in a household
with different accents, gender/sexual formations, and cultural attachments bouncing around all the time, I have no idea who I am. Perhaps this is the best place to
begin to rethink identification and the visual, which always must begin self-consciously from a position of awareness regarding the stakes of one’s own identifications. The question becomes, then, not “who am I?” (an impossible query with no
answer) but: “who do I think I am?” and “who do I want to be and why?”
Notes
1
The unpublished article by James Fearon, “What is Identity (As We Now Use the
Word)?” Stanford University, Department of Political Science (3 November 1999),
is a very useful summary of the current use of the term in identity-related public
debates, which, he notes, derives largely from the work of psychologist Erik Erikson
in the 1950s. As Fearon notes, the number of dissertations with the word “identity”
in the title (presumably in the US) tripled between 1981 and 1995, exemplifying the
historical rise of a consciousness of identity politics I trace here in relation to visual
arts discourses and practices; see his “abstract,” and Footnote 1, p. 1.
Prologue xxvii
2
3
4
On naming of identifications as a historical problem, see Laura Doan’s Chapter
Four, “‘We Cannot Use that Word’: On the Habits of Naming, Name-calling, and
Self-Naming,” in Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern
War, 1914–18 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Key sources addressing identity from a philosophical or cultural studies point of
view, which have informed my arguments, include all of the work of Stuart Hall and
the following: Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, ed., Questions of Cultural Identity (London:
Sage, 1996); Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005); Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed.,
Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Zygmunt Bauman, Identity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Antony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); John Rajchman, ed.,
The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jonathan Rutherford, ed.,
Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990); Jonathan
Rutherford, After Identity (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2007). It is notable that
the vast majority of sources on identity (as on the related “multiculturalism”) were
published in the 1990s, aside from Rutherford’s “after” identity book.
In addition, I have drawn upon myriad other sources addressing visuality and
identity or visual culture and identity politics, which are too numerous to name here,
but include these major publications: bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Jonathan Rajchman, ed., “The Identity in
Question: A Special Issue,” October 61 (1992); Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness:
Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York: Documentext, McPherson & Company, 1992);
bell hooks, Art on My Mind (New York: The New Press, 1995); Kathryn Woodward,
Identity and Difference: Culture, Media, and Identities (London: Sage Press, 1997); Juliet
Steyn, ed., Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics, and Art (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997); Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender
in Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Irit Rogoff,
Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Nick Mirzoeff,
ed., Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (New York: Routledge,
2000); Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Ken Arnold, Mick Gordon,
Nikolaos Kotsopoulos, James Peto, and Chris Wilkinson, ed., Identity and Identification,
exhibition catalogue (London: Black Dog Publishing in association with Wellcome
Collection, 2009).
See William Douglas, “With Obama in Mind, Blacks Told to Vote, Not on
Race, but on Issues,” Buffalo News (February 11, 2007), available online at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_8030/is_20070211/ai_n42965610/ (accessed
April 28, 2010).
For example, Maria Hinojosa presents the quote to Angela Davis, who responds:
“It’s a false issue. It’s really not about whether he is Black enough. It is about his
politics. I think we should be far more concerned about the politics of the person
and whether the candidate is willing to associate himself or herself with the needs
of masses of people.” See Maria Hinojosa, “Angela Davis on Race in America,” an
interview, “Now on the News with Maria Hinojosa,” Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS) television, February 16, 2007; transcript available online at http://www.pbs.
org/now/news/308-transcript.html (accessed April 28, 2010).
Just to cite one of myriad examples, Diana Taylor sketches the paradoxes of such
uses of pre-given labels in her study of Latin American performance as she notes the
absurdities of how the identification “Latin American,” putatively geographic (yet
also racialized in the US imaginary), functions in the US to conflate whites, blacks,
Amerindians, and others from South and Central America as “people of color.”
See Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 121.
xxviii Prologue
5
Black and women candidates—most notably in the post-Second World War period
Shirley Chisholm and Jessie Jackson—had run in the past but were never considered
serious candidates.
6 See my critique of Freestyle, “The ‘Post-Black’ Bomb,” Tema Celeste (Milan, March
2002), pp. 52–55; I take a renewed look at this exhibition in the context of debates
about multiculturalism in Chapter 4.
7 For an interesting, but flawed, critique of identity rhetoric see Rogers Brubaker,
Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society, 29, n. 1 (February 2000),
pp. 1–47. Brubaker and Cooper express understandable frustration with some of
the oversimplistic uses of the term or notion of “identity” as a hard (essentializing,
necessary for coalitional politics) or soft (over-generalizing) term that liberal scholars
in the humanities and social sciences often deploy without rigor. They make the
very useful argument that with the work of leftist social constructivists, bent on
articulating anti-essentialist notions of identity, “we often find an uneasy amalgam
of constructivism language and essentialist argumentation. This ... reflects the
dual orientation of many academic identitarians as both analysts and protagonists of
identity politics,” p. 6. Indeed, in examining, identity theorists most often start from
a position of assuming its importance, and even assuming that it is a desirable political
goal to assert or affirm particular identities. And Brubaker and Cooper’s suggestion of
replacing “identity” with more precise formulations such as “identification” parallels
my method and aim in this book, as I will note below. However, I take issue with
their caricaturing of identity theory and their conflation of problems with identifying
(i.e., the tendency to generalize or assume fixed or knowable “identities” in writing
history or social analysis rather than keeping in platy complexities of identification
and relationality) with the term identity itself, which has indisputable discursive force
particularly if examined in a critical way. It’s not the term identity that’s the problem
per se, although as I argue here it can often be used in “soft” and ineffective or in
overly rigid and dangerous ways; it’s beliefs about how (or whether) we can “know”
another that are at issue. They caricature constructivist models of identity theory
by noting, for example, “the language of ‘identity’ disposes us to think in terms of
bounded groupness. It does so because even constructivist thinking on identity takes
the existence of identity as axiomatic. Identity is always already there as something that
individuals and groups ‘have’,” p. 126. In fact, their (and my) idea of identification
as a process of shifting self-articulations expressed in process in relation to others is
based largely on constructivist theories of identity as performative and open-ended
(the work of Judith Butler here is key). It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
8 The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report on the Menezes
event notes, disturbingly, detailed information on the series of misrecognitions,
pivoting around the assumption that terrorists in the UK context must be “Asian”
and that, indeed, Menezes was somehow implicated due to his “Asian” appearance.
I am indebted to Patel’s research on the IPCC report as elaborated in his “Queer
Desi Visual Culture Across the ‘Brown Atlantic’,” PhD dissertation, University of
Manchester, 2009, pp. 2–3. Patel rightly connects the British event to the US murders
in 2001—also based on misrecognition and stereotyping.
9 Of course I would not reduce my outsiderness to color—value systems, accent, bodily
comportment, even my mode of transport (arriving by bus from the other side of
town), all of these made me stand out. And of course in the US color is inextricably
linked to class; I was as different because of my middle-class privilege from most
of the black kids as I was from the kids we (the white and black middle-class kids)
unthinkingly, and in a bigoted way, called “white trash.”
10 Interestingly, since I moved away, North Carolina, like many parts of the Midwest
and East Coast, now has a large Latino population. It had virtually none when I was
growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s. The psychology at the time was “white” or
“black,” and all micro-identifications (such as Jewish) fit into these categories (in the
Prologue xxix
case of Jewish, “white”). I had to move to New Jersey as a teenager in order to “see”
Jewishness as a separate ethnicity.
11 The UK is statistically 90 percent white; Oldham is almost 87 percent white. See “2001
Census of Population Briefing Note,” UK national census, 2001, available online at:
http://www.oldham.gov.uk/oldham-key-statistics.pdf (accessed May 27, 2011).
12 The US is roughly 75 percent white while the UK, as noted above, is roughly
90 percent white, and of course the history of slavery and the legacy of the US
developing in modern times as an immigrant nation has something to do with
these differences. For the US statistics see the US Census Bureau website:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_
name=ACS_2009_5YR_G00_&-mt_name=ACS_2009_5YR_G2000_B02001
(accessed May 27, 2011).
13 The Canadian demographics statistics avoid categorizing populations according to
“race,” opting instead for “ethnic origins,” which is surely more accurate and less
problematic but also leaves unclear how many people would be identified, for example,
as “black” or “Asian.” See Statistics Canada, “Population by selected ethnic origins,
Montréal,” available online at: http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/demo27eeng.htm (accessed May 27, 2011). Montréal’s demographics, and those of Québec
in general, are extremely complex. I have noticed while living here and reading
anglophone Canadian papers such as Toronto’s Globe and Mail that Montréal is not
considered as “diverse” as Toronto. What such facile evaluations mask is the fact that
the diversity of Montréal in particular is based on class, culture, and language rather
than the common idea of “visible minority” (although the city is, even so, almost
one-third visible minority). Montréal, as compared to the rest of Canada, has a vastly
more complex tapestry of first languages spoken among its residents, indicating an
“invisible” and perhaps “audible” diversity that is not accommodated by simplistic
notions of diversity coming from US-style 1970s identity politics. Also, the issue
of nationalism of course complicates the situation in Montréal and Québec—in the
2001 census, the Canadian government included a write-in section for ethnicity and
many Montréalers chose “Canadian” (1.6 million) and some chose “Québecoise”
(roughly 72,000) as an ethnicity. In such ways, Québec and particularly Montréal
give the lie to the entire concept of ethnicity—is it based on language? Religious
community (the original francophone population was Catholic, the anglophones
protestant)? Claims of first-nation status (usually ignored in local debates, sadly)?
Or (as with the census) simply a choice of national-cum-ethnic identifications?
These statistics are from the 2001 and 2006 censuses, as reported in Wikipedia (with
links to original documentation), available online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Demographics_of_Montreal (accessed June 8, 2011).
14 In the South I believed in taking the rap, but my family to my knowledge, based in
the Midwest, had had no direct connection with slavery (although one never knows;
there are always possible direct links that might have been hidden from view). In
the UK, I felt strongly the fault was not mine to own, although I was generally
sympathetic with working-class positions.
15 While I critique an over-reliance on psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and visual
analysis in Chapter 3, I accept and embrace the general idea, which is psychoanalytical,
European, and modernist, that at this point in time the best explanatory model of our
way of constituting ourselves in the West is the psychoanalytic model of understanding
that we navigate difference through identification and/or projection.
16 According to the 2000 census, Los Angeles is not majority white; it was in 2000
roughly 31 percent white and 45 percent Latino/Hispanic; 9.5 percent Black; and
11.8 percent Asian. See “Los Angeles Almanac,” based on 2000 census, available
online at: http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po13.htm (accessed June 8, 2011).
Of course white mainstream culture (for example, as evident in the entertainment
industry, which heavily favors movies about white middle-class people) is still
xxx Prologue
dominant as far as power, money, and visibility goes; but the leadership of the city
(former long-term mayor (1973–93), Tom Bradley, was African American and the
current mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is Latino, and these statistics make clear that
white dominance, and indeed perhaps whiteness as an assumed and invisible category
of privilege in general, is on the wane.
1
Introduction
The leaking frame of the argument on
how to see differently
This book is proposed as a history and theory of identification in the visual arts.
It is a rethinking but one that acknowledges past histories of ideas about subjectivity and visuality in general and, more specifically, in relation to visual arts practices
widely construed, including performance art. I insist that it is worth rethinking
the question of identification through an attention to aesthetics and the visual arts.
As Juliet Steyn felicitously puts it, acknowledging alterity through visual representation “prevents complete identification and totalization. That which has been
traditionally thought of as aesthetics is reaffirmed as a site in which the limits of
the thinkable are at work and might be rephrased and represented.”1 In the end,
to oppose the kind of totalizing “identification” Steyn notes as a danger (the kind
epitomized in today’s view by the most simplistic moments of 1970s and 1980s
identity politics and identity-oriented art practices), I hope to provide a provisional
new model for understanding identification as a reciprocal, dynamic, and ongoing
process that occurs among viewers, bodies, images, and other visual modes of the
(re)presentation of subjects.
A key point, made clear by my opening anecdotes in the prologue, is that we
must still account for identification (if not “identity” in the 1970s sense) in acknowledging how we interpret and give value to art or visual culture, broadly construed to include
everything from painting to photography, installation, digital and film works, performance, and hybrid practices.2 The interpretive model I propose, inspired by the
visual arts projects I focus on as case studies and by a wide range of philosophical
and theoretical texts, thus implicates a complex range of subjects who are variously
identified in the ongoing production of meaning and value across the visual field.
Nothing could be of more pressing political importance, in my view, in today’s
world, where every day in every newspaper and on blogs, tweets, and sundry other
venues issues of identification still persist in haunting our every discussion about
what is going on in contemporary society.
2 Introduction
Before proceeding to map out the chapters, a word on the paradox of defining what I hope to be putting continually in question; a word on the problem
of framing. As Jacques Derrida points out in his critique of Kant’s model of the
aesthetic, it presupposes the possibility of framing the work of art: of establishing
once and for all what is art and what is not. Illustrating his critique, the “Parergon” in the 1978 book Truth in Painting, with elaborate etchings of Baroque
frames (where the frame itself is a work of art) and with images of caryatids on
buildings (where the decorative human form is a “frame” rather than the substance of the building), Derrida effectively deconstructs the fantasy that we can
know what art “is”—we can never separate the “inside” (which is “art”) from the
“outside” (its discursive and institutional frames). Later in the book he demonstrates as well that this impossibility infects our desire to know the subject who
is the origin of the work—and thus to project meaning by imputing intentionality and will as causal forces behind the appearance of the work, by “restitution”
(returning the work to its author). These insights are crucial to my arguments
throughout Seeing Differently. But most importantly for my introductory arguments is Derrida’s understanding that the “frame is problematical,” in that it leaves
him hanging in ambiguity: “I do not know what is essential and what is accessory
in the work … Where does the frame take place,” and as a corollary, where and
how does aesthetic judgment or interpretation take place?3
Ultimately, this problem cannot be solved because the framing process is both
necessary and impossible. We have to define what we are doing using a common
language (terms such as “Western”) even when we are seeking to interrogate or “go
beyond” such terms. And the definitions, because the terms function in multiple,
ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory ways, will never fully gel as would be
ideal if we could return to the days of certainties and fixed “identities.”There is and
always will be leakage between inside and outside of the frame or the matte (passepartout) inside the frame, which foregrounds the work of art: “The internal edges
of the passe-partout are often beveled.”4 For Derrida this beveling is a metaphor
for the contamination of interpretation. There is a staining on the passe-partout,
marking the bodily and desiring role of the interpreter in defining what a work
is and what it means.5 As I will note at the end of this chapter, I must frame this
study—and in doing so I must reiterate to some degree the binaries I seek to critique—but I will also self-consciously remark upon the shifting appearance, location, and functioning of every frame I put in place. Here, the chapters themselves
can be discursively mapped, provisionally “framed,” as they will unfold.
Proceeding: chapter summaries
I want to make several key points to establish my framework here—points I will
be elaborating throughout the book. In order to address the false consciousness
behind post-identity rhetoric, I want to sketch several overlapping histories while
at the same time theorizing how art is always already about identity or, as I will call
Introduction 3
it, identification in the first place. The first history I trace to set the stage for my
critique, which I elaborate at length in Chapter 2, “Art as a binary proposition;
identity as a binary proposition,” is that of the development of beliefs about art that
define it as the expression of an individual, and thus ascribe its meaning and value in
relation to how we identify that individual (via ideas about his or her “identity” that
themselves, paradoxically, are partly or entirely determined through interpretations
of the works of art). The second history, also addressed in Chapter 2, is the development of binary models for understanding identity in Euro-American culture,
deriving from Enlightenment ideas about the self or the subject and in particular
Hegel’s oppositional model of the master/slave dialectic.These are models for what
came to be called “identity politics” in the 1960s and the following decades, which
developed largely out of binary structures of belief about the self and the other
coming out of European colonizing and industrializing processes.6
Acknowledging and tracing these histories of movements, theories and ideas,
beliefs and critical models of analysis is a crucial goal of this book—for, as I have
noted, it is the erasure of the complexity of these histories, or of the histories in
toto, that allows the fatuous and politically empty rhetoric of post-identity to take
hold and flourish in the face of all evidence to the contrary. While the scope and
ambition of this book might appear to be vast (one would certainly urge a student
strongly away from such a conceit: a book exploring both the history and theories
of identity in contemporary art, with reference to the beginning of the notion of
art in Europe in the early modern period!), I hope it is clear already just how focused it is. In no way do I actually presume to trace a comprehensive intellectual
history of the role of identity or debates about identity in aesthetics, nor to add to
the wealth of aesthetic philosophy that has developed in art history and philosophy departments; nor do I pretend to deal at all comprehensively with the rise of
identity politics and its relationship to developments in Western contemporary art.
To the contrary, as the following more extended chapter summation will clarify, I
have a very specific and pointed set of examinations in mind to achieve the goals
noted above.
In Chapter 2 I thus explore the ways in which structures of belief attach artworks to individuals while, at the same time, modern Euro-American concepts of
identity, as noted, stage the self in opposition to an other (the “master” in opposition to the “slave”). The work of art is central to the Euro-American construction
of the modern subject. The legacy of Renaissance to modern, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century, European aesthetics was to elaborate a way of understanding
a particular kind of individual expression as a “work of art,” thereby reciprocally
defining both the origin of the work (as “author”/artist) and the work itself (as the
authentic expression of the artist). As has been pointed out, this discourse conflates
artwork with a set of identities circulating around the artist or “author-function,”
Michel Foucault’s term for identifying the way in which in European thought we
reciprocally determine the identity of the author and the work—we read the latter
to discern the former’s supposed intention, which we then cast back on the work
to confirm our interpretation.7 As I explore in this chapter through the work of
4 Introduction
Donald Preziosi and others, the visual arts have a particularly over-determined
relationship to this circular system of attribution given the attachment of art to a
global art market, thereby exacerbating what Derrida terms the “divine teleology
[that] secures the political economy of the fine arts,” intensifying the importance of
assigning works to an originating “genius,” thereby reciprocally valuing the work,
the artist, and the art critic or art historian.8
I link this conceptual belief system to the development of a European perspective, and structures of subjectification linked to this mode of understanding the
world as rooted in the originating creative subject.9 Here I will note as well the
interrelation between perspectival models of seeing and making with early modern
philosophies of the subject, from Descartes to Kant and Hegel, the latter of whose
theory of subjectivity in the model of the master/slave dialectic was developed
in twentieth-century neo-Hegelian theory to crystallize the binary at the base of
modern European thought. In this way, I stress the profound influence of Hegel’s
master/slave dialectic on twentieth-century models of subjectivity and identity, as
reinterpreted in the crucially influential lectures of Alexandre Kojève in Paris in
the 1930s (attended by some of the key figures responsible for the early development of what would come to be called poststructuralist theories of meaning and
subjectivity, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty). I also trace
the political codification of the master/slave model of subjectification of the 1940s
and 1950s in the identity theory of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, both
working in close proximity with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
I go on to briefly explore the extension of Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s oppositional
models of identity formation (Beauvoir of course stressing gender and sexuality,
but mentioning class and race; Fanon explicitly foregrounding race and nationality, and implicitly addressing gender, sexuality, and class) into post-1960 models of
coalitional identity politics. The extent to which these latter models are informed
by the Hegelian binary structuring of Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s model cannot be
overestimated, nor can the impact of this binary model on Freudian psychoanalysis,
which largely determined structures of critical analysis in art criticism, art history,
and film theory, particularly of the feminist variety, from the early 1970s into the
1980s. Chapter 2 thus provides a particular and necessarily schematic history of the
impact of identity theory and identity politics on art discourse and art making from
the 1960s onward.
Core beliefs about identity condition our every encounter with works of art.
Debates about identity have had a profound impact on the visual arts broadly construed, and, tied to binary structures of subjectivity in general, continue to inform
the way we view and discuss visual culture. To this end, Chapters 3 through 5 trace
histories and theories of ideas about identity and art through the 1970s and 1980s
(Chapter 3) and then through the 1990s (Chapter 4) and 2000s (Chapter 5). As
Chapter 3, “Fetishizing the gaze and the anamorphic perversion: ‘the other is you’,”
explores, using numerous art practices as case studies, the binary model of self and
other that became reified to some degree through psychoanalytic visual theory by
the 1970s and 1980s—a particularly strong movement within feminist art and film
Introduction 5
theory as practiced in the UK and US. This is a key moment of the infiltration of
identity politics into the Western art world.
Beginning with a series of extended examples of how artists since 1960 have
explored fetishism, and ultimately rejected its binaries, I address the uses of fetishism in explorations of sexual and racial difference with the rise of identity politics,
and particularly in feminist theory, with its emphasis on “sexual difference” and
foregrounding of psychoanalytical models of subject formation. In order to challenge the tendency to focus singularly on “gender” as a separable category, and one
defined in binary terms through Freud’s model of fetishism, I examine the historical
and theoretical relationship among Freudian, Marxian, ethnographic, and imagistic
fetishisms, as these are activated in modern Western visual imagery. Fetishism, I argue, parallels the general knowledge system of Western modernity, where a subject
can potentially (in theory if not in practice) attain a position of complete mastery in
relation to the “world picture” (in the words of Martin Heidegger), one coincident
with the authorial position of a perspectivally rendered work of art and with what
feminist visual theorists in the 1970s and 1980s termed the “male gaze.”10
Ultimately, to rethink this deadlock, I look towards the notion of anamorphosis,
the rendering of an image on a two-dimensional plane that defeats this illusion
of perspectival knowing, to challenge the focus on fetishism as a singular model
through which to understand visual identification. Through its distortion, anamorphosis willfully ruins the logic of the world picture and of models of normative
subjectivity identified by feminists, anti-racists, and queer theorists as subtending
Western culture in the modern period.
Chapter 4, “Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and ‘post-identity’,” explores
current debates about multiculturalism in Europe and North America as an access
point to address its rise and fall within the US art world, particularly in its main
commercial center of New York. Linked to this extended examination of debates
about multiculturalism (a code word for racial and ethnic difference and often, on
the larger international stage, for issues of immigration) is an attention to the development of terms such as post-feminism and post-black in curating and art criticism in the 1990s, terms themselves linked to the idea of political correctness and
post-identity in US culture as a whole. Discussing these debates in the art world
is a way of highlighting what is at stake in the continued retrenchment and refusal
explicitly to address political aspects of how art comes to mean and have value. As
well, I strategically link these debates to larger global discussions since the attacks
on the US World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001—these post9/11 (as these events are termed) discussions pivot around aspects of identification
still largely unacknowledged in art discourse and practice: particularly those of
faith-based cultures and tropes. By addressing this broader framework I point to
the crucial political imperative of continuing to find ways to understand how we
identify and give meaning and value to art.
“Queer feminist durationality: time and materiality as a means of resisting spatial objectification,” Chapter 5, extends my historical exploration of the pressures of
identity on visuality by looking at several key practices since the mid-1990s, which
6 Introduction
have worked in different ways to explore circuits of identification through the actual
materiality and processes of art making. Here I propose a new theory of visuality and
identification, drawing on the key notion of durationality from the c. 1900 philosophy of Henri Bergson, and its contemporary reconfiguration in the work of Gilles
Deleuze and art historian Simon O’Sullivan, inspired by the work of queer theorists
such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I open the chapter with a discussion of feminist
“cunt art,” which I argue opens a hole in fetishism (in its spatializing structure of
objectification) by making a durational identification with the image/body possible.
This case study enables me to begin to articulate a theory of what I call queer feminist
durationality, a mode of critical engagement made possible by certain kinds of visual
culture.The chapter develops this model via other recent visual arts projects from the
past two decades that mobilize materials in ways that allow for complex identifications that open out temporal relations. Temporality leads to a critical tension and an
acknowledgment of histories—and the bodies that made and inhabited the past—as
well as of the relationality of our own sense of identification, in this body today, with
these materialized versions of human creative action from the past.
This underlines again the key critical point I propose in Seeing Differently and
one to which I return in the conclusion of the book: that we must continue to
acknowledge the ways in which bodies are identified and positioned in the world
(including our own), while refusing to allow our assumptions about identity to
congeal into fixed binaries. In order to promote this politics, it is—I will insist—
essential first and foremost to keep the durational aspects of how we identify in
the foreground. This insistence corresponds to points made in important identity
theories over the past two decades by scholars radically rethinking the fixities of
1970s-style coalitional identity politics.
Rethinking identity as identification
The ultimate goal of the book is to think beyond or, given Derrida’s caveat, against
the grain of binary models of identity in favor of multiple, intersectional, and relational processes of identification (by which in all cases I mean to include disidentification as well). If my first goal is to trace histories and to foreground the
persistence of beliefs about identity, and of identifications, in culture at large and
in art discourses and practices in particular, my second goal here is thus to think
beyond binary models of understanding self and other (such as are epitomized in
the useful but now anachronistic theories of fetishism so dominant in the 1970s
and 1980s). These two moves could not be more important at this point in time;
the second is perhaps more acutely pressing as an issue for the future but it must be
built on some knowledge of the past. It must be utopian to some degree—it must,
in José Esteban Muñoz’s incisive queer theoretical formulation, act as a “backward
glance that enacts a future vision.”11 Some attempt at understanding histories of
identity politics, theories of identification, and art and cultural pasts is crucial to
imagining future strategies.
Introduction 7
This imagining must be flexible and durational, open to challenges and to the
vicissitudes of interpretation rather than prescriptive or rigid. Most cultural producers, scholars, writers, and activists have now gone beyond strategies that were
useful in the 1970s in the art world but also in other sectors of Western culture (and
of course there are no firm boundaries between areas of culture now either with
the rise of networking and digital cultures). Younger generations no longer tolerate or even register the invocation of simplistic binary structures to fix identity in
terms of categories.This generational shift is most evident both in terms of changed
articulations of subjectivity in relation to new technologies of social networking,
and the completely transformed demographics of urban centers around the world.
In terms of the former, the potential for occupying a range of enunciative positions through social networking websites is transformational; these positions of
enunciation are often labeled “identities” but, given their slipperiness, are more
usefully, as current parlance has it, called “avatars” or “sockpuppets”—personas that
may or may not correspond to one’s appearance and everyday identifications. From
February to June of 2011, for example, lesbian activist Amina Abdullah became an
international heroine through her blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” fighting against
government oppression and homophobia in war-torn Syria. Her cause was taken
up internationally by journalists and other bloggers, her case seen to exemplify the
regressive barbarity of Syrian oppression and to confirm the superiority of Western
liberal secularism and tolerance. After Abdullah was supposedly kidnapped, precipitating an international firestorm of protests calling for her release, it was discovered
that “she” is actually a 40-year-old male, an American graduate student at University of Edinburgh named Tom McMaster. Abdullah/McMaster is a prime example of a sockpuppet—an online presence that is “false.”The questions such terms
raise—they imply a “real” (thus fixable, knowable) originating subject—must be left
aside here, but they relate directly to my arguments concerning how beliefs about
coherent subjectivity relate to artistic authorship, which I elaborate in Chapter 2.12
In terms of the latter, as Selcuk Sirin has noted in a 2011 New York Times article
on Turkey’s role in the Middle East, Turkey, like most nations around the world, is
now characterized by the emergence of “hybrid identities”: “Young people don’t
buy into this [older generation] idea of a clash [of cultures], and they don’t buy into
this idea of fixed identity. They know how to negotiate these so-called polar opposites and they’re looking for something new.”13 This is one of thousands of quotes I
could have used to make this point, and anyone with students or children can feel
the difference in approach among members of younger generations towards negotiating their place in the world, and towards articulating and positioning themselves
in relation to issues of belonging and difference.
The singular categories on which oppositional models of identity were based
during the rise of European modernity, along with its consolidation of colonies
around the world, no longer have explanatory value, or at least this value is limited
now to understanding past formations and the permutating relationships of today.
It is not enough in the second decade of the twenty-first century, for example, for a
feminist to claim a singular coalitional identification with “women,” with the built-
8 Introduction
Figure 1.1 Lorna Simpson, Guarded Conditions, 1989; 18 color polaroids, plastic
letters, 21 engraved plastic plaques; 231 x 333 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Salon94, New York, © Lorna Simpson.
in assumptions that all women share the same oppressions, while, at the same time,
implicitly assuming that middle-class white women’s problems should be definitive
in establishing feminist goals. Artists such as Lorna Simpson have been making this
point since the late 1980s. Scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Trinh Minh-Ha, Gayatri Spivak, and Saba Mahmood have made inroads into thinking otherwise about
feminism, through issues of race, ethnicity, geographical location, class, and religious
belief.14
My caveat is that I am well aware that I am still in my own thinking structured
by these binary models, having come of age in the 1970s, and in the 1980s and
1990s as a scholar, but nonetheless I argue for an effort, the initiation of a process, to
come up with non-binary ways to think identification. My aim (by Chapter 5) is to
begin to provide an alternative model—one that allows for ever-shifting identifications that are always already intersectional, complex, relational, and never unitary
or fully coherent, for understanding how we identify visually (particularly in works
of art). This aim is linked to the goal of retaining, even highlighting, the political
imperative of still accounting for this process of identifying (and, correlatively, disidentifying), which continues to determine how we navigate art in particular and
other bodies and cultural artifacts in the world in general.15
By stressing identification/dis-identification (and meaning in general) as processes that are relational, flowing among subjects, I am placing this project in the
good company of other crucial thinkers who, since around 1960, have consistently
troubled the binary—from Jacques Derrida, whose theory of différance puts the oppositional terms of the binary in ceaseless motion;16 to cultural theorists such as
Stuart Hall, who pioneered a fluid concept of intersectional identities functioning
Introduction 9
as “points of identification … not an essence but a positioning,” and Anzaldúa, whose
theory of borderlands allows for the in-between status of identifications across class,
race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality;17 to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose
philosophy consistently works to refuse particularly the psychoanalytic binaries
such as the Oedipus complex at the base of theories of identification;18 to more
recent feminist, queer, and anti-racist thinkers such as Sedgwick, Muñoz, Jennifer
Doyle, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rosi Braidotti, who have mobilized complex
models of identification involving relationality, intersectionality, hybridity, and affect in relation to queer, post-colonial, feminist concepts of subjectivity in a political framework to resist structural terms of a simplistic binary. I rely particularly on
those thinkers, such as Muñoz and Doyle, who explicitly address visual imagery and
performance in their work.19
Equally important (if not more so in recent years) has been the theorization of
disidentification. Muñoz, in his important 1999 book rethinking identity politics,
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, fleshes out the concept
of disidentifying as a particularly minoritarian strategy (disidentification is “meant to
be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to
negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes
the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship”20). By 2011, however, the minoritarian/majoritarian binary is no longer
so clear. I would argue that disidentification can be usefully deployed in its queer
sense as articulated by Muñoz but more broadly to address (as he describes its functioning) a “performative mode of tactical recognition” and “a way of shuffling back
and forth between reception and production.”21 I will highlight this performative yet insistently politicized quality within the logic of identification (implicitly
calling forth Muñoz’s stress on the “dis-” identificatory distancing aspect of this
negotiation with existing cultural codes) in this book, linking it to the recognition
and rejection of codes that are binarizing and static and to the refusal of coercive
ideologies promoting identity in terms of fixed and/or oppositional categories. Returning to Muñoz, but putting aside his minoritarian/majoritarian binary, I adopt
his idea of disidentification, then, as “a reformatting of self within the social. It is
a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification.”22
These thinkers (and many more) have compellingly pointed to the ways in which
the binary’s seductively simple reduction of the world to structures of oppositions
can only occur by eradicating the uncontrollable flows of desire and embodiment
that continually threaten such neat packaging. This is a particularly evident and
problematic situation in relation to the visual and performing arts, which at their
best solicit and express precisely these kinds of uncontrollable desires (as Muñoz,
Doyle, myself, and other performance art theorists have pointed out23). A crucial
point for this book is that this loosening of the grip of the binary—the structural
underpinning of Euro-American modernity itself as poststructuralist philosophy
emphasized in its critique—parallels shifts in modes of relating to other people in
the world in the past 50 years, often linked to the massive expansion of networks
of global labor and trade, communications, and travel since the 1950s. Another
10 Introduction
related point is that, without loosening the grip of the binary that still haunts visual
arts discourses and practices, we are becoming anachronistic. These models such as
fetishism, in fact, do not accurately describe any more how sexual subjects come to
navigate the world—the transsexual movement has shown as much.
As Braidotti put the issue optimistically in 2008, “new forms of inter-relationality … enabled by global technological developments” are decoupling the binarisms
built into Freudian conceptions of identity; new “forms of social interaction …
which are nomadic, not unitary; multi-relational, not phallo-centric, connective,
not dialectical; simulated, not specular; affirmative, not melancholy … ” Braidotti
sums up these shifts with the important term “radical relationality,” to which I
will turn in Chapter 5 as I explore queer feminist durationality.24 I take on her
formulation here as I find it deeply compelling, and her specific points about the
decoupling of Freudian binaries as well as her insights on post-secular culture will
underlie my arguments towards the end of the book. Most importantly, Braidotti’s
radical relationality does something different from the neo-Hegelian dialectic that
still defines much of the explicitly identity-politics oriented artwork and critical
thinking, which thereby retain the binary.
Exemplifying the shift … on our way to rethinking, but never
fully “hors-texte”
This book is about tracing intellectual developments through the concretized examples of visual arts practices. Thus, if this introduction sets forth the trajectory
from binary identity politics towards more dispersed theories and understandings of
identification since the 1990s, it is worth looking at specific examples in closing this
introduction to make these points more specific, tying them to particular practices
and strategies of visual exploration. As always I am driven by what artists and other
thinkers are doing to articulate a way of rethinking historically and theoretically the
period at hand. A brief comparison of works from the 1980s and a homage from
the 1990s to these earlier practices serves to clearly set out the kinds of historical
shifts I am interested in tracing here, as well as some of the key artists.
By the 1990s, as suggested by Braidotti and others, rapid demographic shifts
diversified cities and even rural areas around the world, and new technologies of
social networking put pressure on the belief in “authentic” identity (spinning out
identifications online or via mobile phone makes it impossible and disadvantageous
to claim one singular “self ”). In the art domain, multiply identified artists began to
challenge the binary, not so much by overthrowing past strategies (and thus creating a new binary of new versus old) but by building on them. By the 1990s, then,
younger artists such as Glenn Ligon (born in 1960) were already beginning to riff
off of the assumption built into the very logic of binary difference on which fetishism still relied. Ligon and others began interrogating the beliefs still embedded in
critiques of fetishism: that identity could be conveyed visually, that it could only be
articulated in binary terms based on singular categories of identification, and that if
“visualized” it could somehow be understood as singular and static.
Introduction 11
Figure 1.2 Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features /
Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features, 1998; silkscreen
on canvas, two panels: 120 x 40 inches (304.8 x 101.6 cm) each.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © Glenn Ligon.
Ligon’s 1998 Self Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features / Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features is playing off of Adrian Piper’s iconic 1981 work, Self Portrait
Exaggerating My Negroid Features. As a person who could pass as white but who
identified herself as African American, Piper found multiple ways to interrogate
beliefs about visible cues of identity—particularly those attached to whiteness and
blackness in the US. But she did this largely through deliberate and direct reversals,
as with the 1986 Calling Card (a card she would hand to a person she perceived as
white who had made racist remarks in social settings to admonish them for these
comments). By claiming the very “Negroid features” her face, in fact, does not
12 Introduction
Adrian Piper
Adrian Piper has unfortunately refused to allow permission for Self-Portrait
Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981, to be reproduced here. The image
is, however, freely available on websites and, in fact, on Wikipedia commons
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AdrianPiper1981Self-Portrait_Exaggerating.
png, accessed 4 August, 2011). While no explanation was offered to the author,
this refusal typifies the increasing attempts on the part of artists and agencies
to control what is written about artists’ works—arguably an extension of the
commodification and bureaucratization of the global art world.
have—thus repositioning herself as visibly “black”—Piper’s work to some degree,
like that of many feminist artists working in the 1970s and 1980s, relied on the
binary while critiquing it.
This effect is exaggerated in the Calling Card piece; the card reads:
Dear Friend, / I am black./ I am sure you did not realize this when you
made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted
to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately this
invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make
these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and
to distribute this card when they do. / I regret any discomfort my presence is
causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing
me. / Sincerely yours, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper.
While, as Calling Card indicates, Piper relies still on a belief in visibility and its
traps—the problem that occurs when presumably white identified people misread
her ethnic identification and fail to “see” her blackness—Ligon and other younger
artists born after the 1960s explore and articulate identification in more complex
and ambiguous terms. As an example of the shift in strategies, and of the important
legacy of practices such as Piper’s, a 30-something Montréal based artist, Jessica
MacCormack, has in 2011 produced a twenty-first century homage entitled “Ode
to Adrian Piper,” a card that begins “Dear Friend, I am transgendered.You may not
have realized it when you made/laughed at/agreed with that transphobic comment
… ”25 This particular homage points to the irony of shifting the terms of visible
identity to those of semi- or non-visible sexual differences, themselves articulated
often in non-binary terms as “trans” rather than as negatives of existing norms (and
thus as “anti,” “post,” or “non” gendered in this case). It also points to the shift I am
tracing, and thus to some degree creating/reiterating, in this book from an identity
politics based on visibility and knowable, singular categories of identity to a politics
of identification, often charged through queer theory, that allows for ambiguity and
confusion but insists upon the role of identification as a process.
Introduction 13
Ligon’s work also expands this more porous and multifaceted exploration of identification through visual and performative art strategies. As we will see in Chapter 4,
where I explore shifts in Ligon’s practice as exemplary of shifts in theorizing in terms
of identification rather than identity, by 1998, Ligon was respectfully expanding the
terms of this anti-racist critique, making it less binary and opening it, as I will explore
below, to other aspects of identification such as sexuality and class. Ligon claims, with
great irony, both “black” and “white” features as visible in the same photograph—as
indexically rendered, but of course inherently confusing, cues of racial identification.
By the late 1990s the assumptions that identity could be determined visually, and that
identities were more or less static, unitary, and fixed via binary structures of objectification or empowerment were beginning to lose their credibility.
One of my key goals is to contextualize and historicize at every move, as the
above case study makes clear. This is not about younger artists making work that
“supercedes” the hard and important work of Piper and her generation; it is about
honoring such crucial milestones in the history of visual arts and performance, trying to understand the contexts in which they were proposed, while tracing what
we now identify, from the very different moment in which we rethink them, as
specific forms, methods, and strategies that no longer resonate to the same degree,
or resonate differently. Pinpointing how these works no longer speak so directly
to new experiences of being in the world (globalized, hyper-networked, diasporic,
environmentally threatened, etc.) is a way of understanding new strategies and perhaps begin to note their/our limitations even as we articulate them.
I want to stress to this end that this new mode of identification I will propose
towards the end of the book is specifically put forth as unfolding in relation to rather
than as superceding earlier modes of understanding how we identify. This is a crucial point, for avant-gardist models of supercession are themselves binary, pivoting
around a conceit that what has gone before can be completely overturned or left
behind and is therefore somehow the “opposite” of the radically new situation that
now putatively exists—such a mode of thinking dominated, for example, debates
about postmodern art in the 1980s. My attempt to rethink binary models of visual
identification is in fact deeply indebted to these earlier, binary models—not the
least to Simone de Beauvoir’s models of sexual difference and to feminist psychoanalytic visual theory, to Judith Butler’s neo-Hegelian but queer feminist theory of
performative sex/gender identity, and to the more or less oppositional models of
anti-racist postcolonial theory founded in the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said,
and others.26
Returning to the necessity and impossibility of framing, I am within various
frames but struggling to identify and in some cases shake them off. This book insists in a Derridean vein that there is no “beyond” that does not hold vestiges of
what it seeks to supercede—“il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside the
text), in Derrida’s now famous terms.27 And yet the key political urgency of Seeing
Differently is that we must try, and try, and continue to try to think otherwise—if, as
Derrida insists, only with existing tools and languages. What follows is a struggle, a
discursive record of this effort.
14 Introduction
Notes
Steyn, “Introduction,” in Juliet Steyn, ed., Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics, and Art
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 5.
2 This locution is deliberate; I am not proposing to look at intentionality or to propose
I can in any way excavate the artist’s “identity” behind the work—to the contrary, the
point is aimed at how art is displayed, critically examined, and otherwise given meaning
based on what we believe the identifications informing it to be.
3 Derrida, Truth in Painting (1978), tr. Geoff Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), p. 63; this is the “Parergon” section; see also “Restitutions,” pp. 255–382.
4 Ibid., p. 13; this is the “Passe-Partout” section. In French passe-partout has the meaning
of the matte used in framing but also of “pass-key,” and Derrida has a field day playing
out these dual meanings.
5 On these points, see my essay “‘Every man knows where and how beauty gives him
pleasure’: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural
Age, Emory Elliot, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 215–39.
6 For background and further recent debates on identity politics in the academy, see Linda
Martin Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M.L. Moya, eds,
Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
7 Foucault, “What is an Author?”, Language, Counter Memory, Practice, tr. Donald Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1969]1977), p. 123.
8 See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11, n. 2 (Summer 1981), p. 9; see also,
D.N. Rodowick, “Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic,” Deconstruction and the
Visual Arts, Peter Brunette and David Willis, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp96–117.
9 As Luc Ferry puts it, aesthetics is “the field par excellence in which the problems
brought about by the subjectivization of the world characteristic of modern times can
be observed in the chemically pure state,” in Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus:The Invention of
Taste in the Democratic Age, tr. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
[1990]1993), p. 3.
10 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 115–54; and, for
the founding text in “male gaze” theory (although she never uses that exact term) see
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Amelia Jones, ed.,
Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, second edition (New York: Routledge, [1975]2010),
pp. 57–65.
11 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York:
New York University Press, 2009), p. 4.
12 On Abdullah, see the Guardian article reporting her situation as a fact, by pseudonymous
journalist “Katherine Marsh,” “A Gay Girl in Damascus becomes a heroine of the Syrian
revolt,” the Guardian (May 6, 2011), available online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
world/2011/may/06/gay-girl-damascus-syria-blog (accessed June 17, 2011), and the
follow-up article exposing the hoax, Esther Addley, “Syrian lesbian blogger is revealed
conclusively to be a man,” the Guardian (June 13, 2011), available online at: http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom-macmaster (accessed
June 17, 2011).
13 Sirin is cited in Anthony Shadid, “Can Turkey Unify the Arabs?” The New York Times,
“Week in Review” section (May 29, 2011), p. 6.
14 See for example Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987/1999);Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other:Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge,
1987); and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
1
Introduction 15
15 See black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s important work in intersectionality,
including her essay “Whose Story is it Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations
of Anita Hill,” in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas,
and the Construction of Social Reality, Toni Morrison, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp.
402–36.
16 Derrida, “Différance” (first given as a lecture in 1968), in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1–28.
17 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory:
A Reader, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds (New York: Columbia University
Press, [1990]1994), p. 395; and Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. Hall has been one of
the key figures first in putting issues of coalitional identity politics front and center in
academic thought, as one of the key founders of British cultural studies in the 1960s in
Birmingham, and second in articulating a nuanced model of identity as identification.
Earlier in this same essay, Hall thus describes identification as a negotiation, an interpretive
issue: “ … who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never
exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think.
Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new
cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’
which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside,
representation,” p. 392. Anzaldúa pioneered feminist border and anti-racist theory; this
crucial book theorizes the notion of in-between that allows for an opening in the
thinking beyond binaries.
18 Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), tr. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977) and A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, [1980]1987).
19 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)
and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002); Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006); Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border
Crossers: The Artist Talks Back (New York: Routledge, 2000); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic
Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994) and “In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in
Feminism,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, n. 1 (2008), pp. 1–24. It is worth noting that
Sedgwick mentored Muñoz and Doyle (she was their PhD supervisor at Duke University
in the early 1990s)—I find this line of (re-)thinking identification that Sedgwick
encouraged during her career inspirational and draw on it frequently. Innumerable other
queer, feminist, and/or anti-racist and postcolonial theorists have been inspirational.
Some will be cited directly as they have explicitly informed my discussions throughout
the book.
20 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 4–5.
21 Ibid., pp. 97, 25.
22 Ibid., p. 97.
23 See Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race,
and the Depressive Position,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, n. 3,
special issue on “Feminism and Visual Culture,” ed. Amelia Jones and Jennifer Doyle
(2006), pp. 675–88; Doyle’s Sex Objects; and my essay “Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in
Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle,” TDR (The Drama Review: The Journal
of Performance Studies) 50.1, special 50th Anniversary Issue (New York: Spring 2006),
pp. 159–69.
24 Braidotti, “In Spite of the Times,” pp. 12, 16.
25 See the artist’s website, http://jessicamaccormackrmack.tumblr.com/ (accessed May 27,
2011).
16 Introduction
26 It is not often acknowledged just how neo-Hegelian Butler’s work is, but, as crucially
important as it has been to theorizing identity as performative, it is in fact deeply Hegelian
and deeply binary. Her dissertation, published as a book, exemplifies this as it traces
the impact of Hegelian thinking on post-Second World War theories of subjectivity.
See Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987), and her recent work on the Hegelian “struggle for
recognition” that, she argues, structures relations of power in the contemporary world,
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004),
p. 43.
27 Jacques Derrida; Of Grammatology, ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press; 1976), p. 158.