New Museum R&D Seasons Fall 2015: PERSONA

PERSONA SEMINAR RECAP: WEEK 7

For week 7 of our seminar meetings, we considered Hal Foster's concept of mimetic excess, in which an artist performs, and often exacerbates their role within a structure of oppression as a form of critique. Initially employed through the use of persona by Dadaist artists responding to the traumas of WWI, mimetic excess persists as a strategy within contemporary art. Using Foster's analysis of Max Ernst's persona Dadamax as a departure point, we considered the over-identification Chris Krauss performs in I Love Dick through the lens of mimetic excess.

We also looked at the work of Ernst's contemporary, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a poet and artist working in assemblage and readymade sculpture. Recent research has suggested that Freytag-Loringhoven was the person behind the pseudonym R. Mutt, "author" of Duchamp's Fountain. We looked at a few sculptural works by Freytag, one that she titled after Duchamp, and read one poem that involves Duchamp as a character to build on ideas of parasitism begun in the previous week’s discussion of Krauss.

We also thought about the automaton as a form of mimesis. As a sort of “non-personality,” the automaton performs their societal role without thinking. This bare-minimum form of identification reproduces and clarifies the most basic functions of a position through simplification, rather than mimetic excess’s deconstruction of normativity through amplification.

JOIN US on Monday, 12/14 for our PERSONA Seminars: (Temporary) Collection of Ideas Consortium, the culminating event of this season's seminar meetings— http://on.fb.me/1lJDOsQ

Here's a look back at panelist Alexandro Segade's New Museum Residency with My Barbarian (2008) and his performance "Choir Practice" with Malik Gaines as part of Jeanine Oleson's exhibition "Hear, Here" during our Spring 2014 R&D Season: VOICE

My Barbarian, "Post-Paradise, Sorry Again," New Museum, New York, 2008

Post-Paradise, Sorry Again was the culmination of My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) workshops, a residency project at the New Museum in which the collective worked with local artists, musicians, and actors to develop this original work. The performance addresses the staging of liberation and is adapted from the Living Theater’s Paradise Now (1968) and the antitheater’s Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (1969). PoLAAT continues My Barbarian’s self-conscious performance of counterculture, translating what’s thought of as the ’60s into a performance of the present. Through this project, the artists consider the successes and failures of countercultural movements as models from which to organize one’s life in the face of increasingly powerful hegemony.

Courtesy the Artists (Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade), "Choir Practice," part of the series "Hear, Here" Gallery Sessions, New Museum, New York, 2014

Courtesy the Artists worked with the audience to make a provisional choir, interpreting songs of self-empowerment and transforming individual narcissism into group feeling.

Courtesy the Artists is a collaboration between Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade, based in New York. Courtesy the Artists invites artists and others to interpret, react to, and enjoy historical texts that inform present creative conditions. Segade and Gaines are members of the group My Barbarian, which has performed and exhibited extensively.

In anticipation of "Dad Band," Sacha Yanow’s contribution to Wynne Greenwood’s “Temporary Arrangements” series at the New Museum, Season Fellow Amanda Ryan interviewed Sacha to find out more about the artist's process of "finding her inner dad."

AR: How did you come up with the idea of “Dad Band?” How do you think the ideas you’re exploring might resonate with our PERSONA Season theme?

SY: When I was given this prompt for this one-night-only band or “Temporary Arrangement,” it suggested making a band based on “things you care about” or the idea of “coming together.” I don’t know why, but my dad and the music he loved when I was growing up—The Everly Brothers, The Beatles, The Platters, Francoise Hardy—kept coming up, and I was like, “what is that, why is that what’s coming to mind?” So then I started to think about that band as being a way of connecting to my dad, or so to speak, ‘banding’ with my dad. In terms of “PERSONA,” I’m exploring the persona of my dad and all that that means, and all that I inherited from him. What I’m finding through this process is that I’m actually writing a show about me. I’m still working out how to navigate this character; I’m not trying to impersonate my dad and I’m not trying to impersonate myself, it’s more about finding this intersection between the two of us and where that breaks apart. I think about it more as a ritual, trying to take on my dad without commenting on my dad, just really trying to embody him. On a more general level, I was thinking of this idea of the ‘internalized dad,’ larger structures of the patriarchy, white supremacy, white dads, the white patriarchy that we live in. I’m not really trying to approach that idea head on, I’m trying to be really specific about my dad and hoping that people might be able to identify some more universal ‘dad’ qualities embedded in the performance.

In relation to my work in general and this idea of “PERSONA,” I often choose to embody on stage the things about myself that I feel most conflicted, confused, ashamed about in order to learn more about them.

AR: In doing this piece, what sorts of resonances between your inner life and your dad’s have you discovered?

SY: Well, my dad has been a hard person for me to really get to know; perhaps because of these resonances, I am piecing together an inventory of what I do know. I’m exploring his presence and non-presence in my life, and thinking about the quality of that presence, not in terms of judging its caliber, but what it was and is both literally or physically, and emotionally. I’m trying to identify the psychological aspects that I see in my dad and relate to—isolation, fantasy, perfectionism, depression, anger. The biggest thing that I’ve discovered in writing this thing is that I also relate to positive things, like I think I have some of his humor. His humor is very earnest and a little goofy, but also thoughtful and clever.

I’m also noticing, through trying to embody his behaviors, this physicality, a way of moving, and gestures that we share. I’m also trying to understand him better by mimicking his behaviors, which involve a lot of routines and ritual, and asking, “what is this action, how does he spend his time, who is he?” I’ve also collected pieces of physical evidence, objects and images, to flesh out this picture of my dad. The concept is that he is the band, and he’ll be putting on this show for one-night-only and we get to know him through it. The structure is kind of like a band’s show, but there are also elements from mystery and detective novels mixed in, so that the audience and I are trying to piece together the story of getting to know “dad” together.

AR: What are some of the artifacts you’re using to put together this picture of your dad?

SY: Well, one of the strangest things is this video of my dad on a national game show in 1975 (and he is exactly the same age as I am right now). It’s called “To Tell the Truth,” and he’s one of three contestants where he pretends to be an expert, and the celebrity judges have to decide which one is the real expert. He wins! And it’s this funny thing where he’s impersonating being an expert but he seemed to me to assume this role of ‘expert’ in real life and also, more generally, he holds this symbolic position of authority and expertise as my father. And then of course there is the fact that white men are just assumed to be experts.

AR: What was he pretending to be an expert in and what was his actual profession?

He was pretending to be a stinging insect specialist. At the time, he was actually an ad man, like Mad Men-style. My dad was born and raised here in New York City and when he lived here he had a very different lifestyle—dinners and drinking and an active social circle—and then my parents moved up to rural Massachusetts and had me my sister. My mom searched out this game show video and gave it to my dad for his birthday one year, and it was just this glimpse into this completely foreign side of him from before my parents had kids that I never had a chance to know.

SY: How did you know him growing up, was his life like after your parents left the city?

Growing up, we would sometimes watch TV together or read his favorite Agatha Christie books together, those were a couple of ways I could engage with him. He spent a lot of time in his room watching the stock market and I never really knew what he did up there, it was kind of a mystery to me. I spent a lot of time in my room, too. So we were both there, in the same house, but there was a distance.

I also remember spending time with him in the car, listening to his favorite songs. I’m working these into the piece as him doing a kind of sing-along, like he might be listening to these songs in his room, and I might be listening to these songs in my room at the same time, thinking about him listening to these songs, and we’re all in the museum institutionalizing this phenomenon.

AR: What’s your relationship with your dad like now?

Inspired by Anna Watkins Fisher’s essay, “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Sophie Calle and Chris Kraus,” we examined the concept of the “parasite” in week 6 of our PERSONA season seminars, focusing on Kraus’ 1997 novel I Love Dick. Watkins Fisher argues that in the book, Kraus performed an exaggerated role of a marginalized, parasitic figure (as the wife to a famous academic, the +1, the needy lover). Taking up the archetype of the female admirer, dependent on male attention for validation and self-actualization, the character “Chris” wrote a hundreds of letters to a character named “Dick” (Richard) - widely rumored to be based on academic Richard “Dick” Hebdige, a colleague of her ex-husband, Sylvère Lotringer. In her emphatic, almost pathological, embodiment of this role in the novel, she objectifies Dick and inverts the parasitical relationship, subsuming the subjectivity of the host in her own fantasies and desires.

"Parasite" considers a foreign agent that has infiltrated a hosting body, and is in a unique position to disrupt, subvert, or curtail the host’s traditional operations. The parasite feeds off the host without any obligation to reciprocate and provide for the host, disrupting traditional modes of exchange. The parasite could alternatively be described as vampiric, a leech, a groupie, a hanger-on, a freeloader, a gold-digger or a dependent. In this session, we were interested in examining the gender and class connotations of “the parasite” and the role that desire, aspiration, and intimacy play in fostering these relations.

Photos from X-ID REP’s study week w/ Director Lileana Blain-Cruz at New Museum. 

For week 5 of our PERSONA season seminar, we talked about “Celebrity,” and how personas can magnetize attention, capital, and desire as they circulate in public sphere and through private consciousness. We discussed which attributes or tactics make celebrity's personas desirable and how these components can shift for a given audience, context, or history.

We spoke about the existence of different types of celebrities and how they’re consumed, including minor or subculture celebrities (known only within specific circles), reality television stars, and mainstream or major celebrities. In the case of mainstream celebrities, the limited range of archetypes represented narrows the horizon of possibilities for the public. This is especially true for minorities, who may struggle to find aspirational models that they identify with in pop culture. 

In terms of our consumption of reality television stars, they often function as an inverse to mainstream celebrities—instead of being objects of aspiration, they serve as cautionary tales. We discussed the “Teen Mom” phenomenon and the class aspect of these types of shows, where the stars often come from emotionally and/or financially impoverished backgrounds; they give the viewer the satisfaction that, “At least my life isn’t that bad.”

This week in our seminar for R&D Season PERSONA, we considered the topic of “Casting,” considering how roles are assigned to actors, with an eye to the way a script’s meanings can be advanced, complicated, reinscribed, or upended depending on who is cast to play each character. We examined how an actor might channel or adopt the voices of others, and how an actor’s own personal experience, and even body, may be understood as material to be considered in a casting session.

As an exercise, we read Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Bremen Freedom and cast actors from youtube audition videos based on our interpretations of the characters. We considered what characteristics we used to define the ‘types’ we were looking for for each character, and how, through the process of casting, we either reinforced our biases or had them challenged through unexpected character fits. 

Last week in our seminar, we considered the notion of "passing" in relation to our season theme PERSONA. "Passing" considers how individuals take up specific personae to fit in, infiltrate, and otherwise circulate as similar enough to everyone else. We considered a range of political exigencies at play in this optic: the need and desire to pass, the strategic refusal to pass, and the basic inability to even do so for certain groups or communities. We ask: how do practices of citation, copying, mimicry, and standardizing allow people to pass?

ANNOUNCING CAST AND COMPANY OF X-ID REP

We are pleased to announce the full company of resident theater artists participating in X-ID REP, organized as part of our Fall R&D Season: PERSONA. After being selected from a group of more than 25 actors who auditioned as part of a daylong public event on September 20, 8 actors join a resident company of playwrights and directors to develop new work exploring the shifting ethics of intercultural cross-play in contemporary American theater. Open studios in the New Museum theater this fall lead up to final performances January 8 and 9. ‪

A good overview on American Theatre of some of the issues surrounding the use of Yellowface in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado and its subsequent cancellation.

Though his fifth point is questionable—

"5. Ethnic solidarity trumps “pure” authenticity. This is a little thorny, but it must be said that in the American theatre, the convention that has evolved regarding the casting of certain non-white roles is that Asian Americans of any national origin are deemed acceptable to play an Asian of any other national origin, just as Latino Americans of any national origin can play a Latino of any other national origin (this is also true of Arab Americans, who are in turn perhaps too casually interchanged with South Asians and Persians). This is a casting convention that is especially controversial in other parts of the world, as when the American film Memoirs of a Geisha cast Chinese actresses in key lead roles. And it is all too easy to point to this as a seemingly racist double standard—what, so you’re saying that any Asian will do? The key qualifier in the previous sentences was “American”: Art created by and for contemporary Americans ultimately exists in and reflects the here and now...And in the contemporary, still majority-white U.S., ethnic minorities of color whose ancestry shares rough geographical, racial, or linguistic similarities are typically sorted together, not just in the racist they-all-look-alike-to-us sense, but in the we’re-stronger-together-than-apart sense, too."

REQUIRED READING

Kamila Shamsie on the Importance of writing from the point of view of the 'Other.' — From Guernica Magazine

"So in an America where fiction writers are so caught up in the Idea of America in a way that perhaps has no parallel with any other national fiction, where the term Great American Novel weighs heavily on writers, why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states. It’s not because of a lack of dramatic potential in those stories of America in the World; that much is clear.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION VS. IMAGINATIVE ENGAGEMENT

Good primer on some of the issues that form the background for our pop-up repertory theater company, X-ID REP—