Narcissister,
Man Woman
, 2009
Narcissister
Man Woman
The New York artist Narcissister studied Afro-American studies at Brown University and modern dance at the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. She initially worked as a professional dancer. She integrates textile works, collages, sculpture, photography and video into her performance works. Her performances (including All Made Up: Fauxnique / Monique Jenkinson and Narcissister, 2009, This Masquerade, 2010) and videos have been shown in numerous clubs and galleries in New York (The New Museum, New York; The Kitchen, New York) as well as internationally (including Kampnagel Hamburg; Warehouse 9, Copenhagen). She was one of the re-performers for Marina Abramović in her retrospective exhibition “The Artist Is Present” at the MoMA. In 2013 Narcissister had her first solo exhibition Narcissister is You in the gallery envoy enterprises in New York. Her short film "Narcissister Breast Work" premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2020. BK
artist's website:
www.narcissister.com
Narcissister is a
Gesamtkunstwerk
: She is both one and many, spectacular and exhibitionistic, intangible and anonymous. Because she always wears a mask
and wig, her identity remains unknown. Her works refer to an enormous variety
of dance and performance styles – from modern dance to drag show, historical feminist performance art, striptease, porn and burlesque. Wearing costumes that sometimes border on the grotesque – with doll’s heads, cloth vaginas and merkins (genital wigs) – she transforms herself into one of a broad range of characters, including historical personae (Marie Antoinette, Josephine Baker, The Supremes), cultural stereotypes (Russian Matryoshka dolls, African-American nanny), or global workers (stripper, waitress, market woman). She subverts clichés from mass culture by seeming to affirm them; the nakedness of the figures remains masked and her characters fragmented.
Courtesy Narcissister
Format
video, colour, sound, 5:50 min
Issue date
2009
Tags
de/construct identities
,
femininity
,
gaze
,
masculinity
,
masquerade
,
pleasure
,
queer/drag
,
voyeurism
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abstraction
activism
aggression
aging
appropriation
authorship
be-coming
beauty
body control
body object relation
cabaret
capitalism
childhood
collectivity
conflict
consumerism
craft
dance/choreography
de/construct identities
death
desire
destruction
dis/ability
dis/appearance
dreamscapes
durational performance
exhaustion
extended body
failure
fashion/glamour
femininity
flesh
fluxus
fragmentation
gaze
happening
health/illness
his/herstory
housework/carework
human/non-human animals
in/visibility
inscription
institutional critique
intimacy
labour
language
laughter/humorous
lecture performance
manifesto
masculinity
masquerade
mass media
maternity
measuring
metamorphosis
migration
military
music
mythology
nationalism
nature
networks/affiliations
normativity
pain
painting/drawing
participation
patriarchy
pleasure
pop
post-communism
precarity
private/public
public space
queer
queer/drag
racism
re-enactment
repetition/seriality
resistance
ritual
roleplay
score
sexual violence
sexualities
skin
sound
state oppression
stereotypes
the common
therapy
torture
touch
trash
violence
voice
voyeurism
vulnerability