#cherise smith

The artist's identity-switching performances portend the existence of a culture and society in the United States wherein difference does not divide, dissimilarities are leveled, and distinctions do not necessarily lead to disparity and entrenched hierarchies... Ironically, because Lee's _Projects_ emphasizes how dependent she is on the privilege her intersectional (national, ethnic, gender, racial, and sexual) identity provides, they contradict the very post-racial and postidentity ideology they are said to service. The artist's intersectional identity in combination with her well-defined artistic authority accentuates the continued relevance of identity-positions and the importance of mobilizing action around them. Lee's series, like Piper's, Antin's, and Smith's performances, underscores the power of the artist to control her identifications through her art making - a dynamic that,m in its subversion of persistent identity-based hierarchies, remains remarkable and significant. As is the case with the works of the other artists featured here, **Lee's _Projects_ can be interpreted as supporting the politics of identity, yet it is perhaps more appropriate to understand them as testaments to the slippery ambivalence that defines racialization and identity-making in the United States.**

[Nikki S Lee] declares an interest in showing audiences the range of personnae they inhabit: "There is the persona you present to a schoolteacher or to your parents or to a new boyfriends. Each is affected by the context and each shows a gap between inside and outside. Each is a personal performance." The artist's statements seem to demonstrate a strong allegiance to the idea that identity is socially, culturally, and performatively constructed, a series of causes and effects in which "someone else's identity affects" hers. In the hypothetical scenario Lee sets up, factors that affect identity have rather superficial outcomes, yet her difference continues to be a subject of commentary for the artist and her critics. That Lee and her _Projects_ series can be freighted with such seemingly contradictory interpretations and ideologies is worth exploring because it points to a certain identity-based exceptionalism that flies in the face of the postidentity, colorblind rhetoric for which her work is often used to service. ...On the one hand, the artist's assertion of her agency to determine her own identity can be understood as a positive manifestation of the politics of identity. On the other, Lee's belief in her own exceptionalism and prioritization of individual-oriented identity-formation can be interpreted as evidence of a rugged and stubborn individualism that is a prominent aspect of postidentity and colorblind rhetorics which see difference as mere flavor.

Apropos to the rhetoric of postidentity, Lee's _Projects_ seems to support the postidentity claim that race and ethnicity are no longer factors that affect social, material, economic, and political circumstances and to demonstrate that identification is individually determined, culturally and socially constructed, and above all, not political... For Dalton, Lee's work suggests that social identity has "at least as much to do with conscious choices about clothing and hairstyle as with facial features and skin color." Dalton's sometimes-condescending statements imply two things about Lee's images: first, they suggest that, in the past when identity mattered, identity was a question of physiognomy rather than a product of the material conditions of the prioritization of certain physiognomic traits over others. Second, that the time for treating identity with gravity and seriousness has been replaced by an approach that favors bouncy freshness. Similarly, that "it can be difficult at first to distinguish Lee from the other people in the picture" and that Lee's "relationships" to "the others" appear "completely unaffected" seems to indicate, to curator Russell Ferguson, that the artist has ushered in a novel way of navigating identity. Lee has, in his words, an "implacable confidence in her own ability to find emotional common ground with virtually anyone." These statements hint at how Lee's work is used to show that politics has been removed from matters of identification and that identity is mostly personal choice based on affinity.

[W]hile Lee desires that the photographs possess a raw "artlessness" that "will register as 'real' for viewers," she also produces a checklist of scenes she wants to depict. Moreover, in addition to controlling how she appears, she chooses when photographs will be taken and, perhaps more significantly, which are suitable for display in exhibitions. Thus, though some element of chance enters the equation because the artist leaves the camera operation to group members, the photographed situations and settings are prescribed and circumscribed by the artist. What is more, Lee controls the manner in which group members and their culture are perceived in addition to how she and her experiences are represented. While the _Projects_ images hover between being professional and amateur, composed and spur-of-the-moment, they do not demonstrate shared ethnographic power so much as they **shore up Lee's autonomy and challenge her subjects' agency.**

[As] Lucy Lippard outlines in "Escape Attempts," conceptual art, in the forms it took in the 1960s and 1970s, was politically motivated, even if not always politically active, and one of tits main concerns was the subversion of the gallery-museum system. Artists attacked the system by employing appropriative strategies, producing ephemera, and launching performative actions, and information, communication, and distribution were highly valued. These tactics, including those borrowed from the documentary tradition, were thought to undermine the perpetuation of the commodity-status of artworks and the cult of artistic originality on which it is based. ...That the end products are photographic snapshots taken not by the artist but by passersby who are untrained in photographic and artistic technique's can be interpreted as evidence of Lee's adherence to the dematerialization project and the de-skilling of the agent-artist, and of her reliance on chance-operations. Indeed, one might interpret the prominence of photographs-as-documentation in the _Projects_ as an emphasis on the performative and experiential aspects of the series. Yet, Lee's use of photographs, understanding of the documentary aspects of photography, and relationship to performance-actions are distinct from those of conceptualists... [In] spite of their inability to account for how collected their dematerialized objects would become as well as for the hallowed position they would come to enjoy in the art world and history, first-generation conceptualists used documents in an earnest attempt to circumvent the gallery-museum system. ...Lee not only ranks the "documentary" remains above her experiential performances but also [devalues] the aesthetic significance of the performative actions to the project. [Her status as] an art-world darling who received institutional funding to produce _The Hip-Hop Project_ ... suggests little or no critical distance from the gallery-museum complex. The appellation "postconceptualist" is, perhaps, more appropriate to the artist's practice then. Such an emphasis on the end-product rather than on process and experience undermines the claims to ethnography that her work portends and, more importantly, shifts the balance of power and authority in Lee's favor.

Author Guy Trebay employs a different, more physically based metaphor, asserting that the artist "experimentally drifts into other people's lives and slips on their skins." The realism on which the above critics comment is due, in part, to the perception that Lee activates the visual signs of particular cultural groups in ways that art-viewing audiences read as accurate and appropriate... The photographs enable Ferguson to conclude that Lee's "own mutating presence in series after series does, in the end, succeed in disrupting any possible confidence in social classification systems of whatever kind. They are all permeable."... Lee's images function thusly because they draw on the visual language and history of documentary photography... Two of documentary photography's best-known offshoots are street and snapshot photography, both of which Lee's images play off... Because they are shot in a style that appears urgent and uncomposed, street photographs are deemed "authentic" and "real," for they uncover the previously hidden... The snapshooter's style [lends] her pictures an air of chance and unscriptedness that photographic critics, historians, and artists admire. Accordingly, snapshots are oftentimes regarded with a primitivist exoticism that casts them as more "authentic," "real," and thus powerful than images created by art-photographers.

The consumption of new "others," combined with the limited subjectivity they garner, Foster argues, buttresses "the self through romantic opposition, conserves the self through dialectical appropriation, extends the self through surrealistic exploration,"... and masks a lack of commitment to disturb the traditional hierarchy of subject positions. Foster contends that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many contemporary artists turn to ethnographic and anthropological methods because their works' focus on the "other" appears political but, in fact, is not. Such ethnographically oriented practices do not question the artist's authority as much as they reinforce it at the same time that they demonstrate a narrow engagement with the group studied... That Lee engages aspects of ethnographic and anthropological methods in the _Projects_ series is obvious; what is less clear is whether she follow Foster's prescriptions: does she place herself and her practices within a critical framework, does her practice subvert or reinforce the outsider status of her subjects, and do the projects share authority or maintain a one-sided flow? And what role do Lee's ethnic, national, racial, sexual, class, and gender positionalities play in those dynamics?

[C]ritics assessments [assert that Lee's _Projects_] work questions stereotypes and participates in recent theorizations of identity. In [Miwon Kwon's] estimation, Lee's _Projects_ not only reduces subcultures to a set of stylish scenes and identity negotiations to a series of outfits but also, and more importantly, rejects the "other" while holding up herself... _Projects_ reinforces "the tried and true technique of modern ethnographic authority - 'you are there... because I was there'." Particularly dismaying for the author is, what she perceives to be, the artist's duplicitous participation in a primitivist exoticism of herself and her subjects: "Rather than disturbing or complicating the voyeuristic desire and primitivist expectations that fuel ethnography and tourism, Lee fulfills them by objectifying herself, collapsing herself into the other _as_ an other, [and] serving happily as a 'native' tour guide."... The author is critical of the assumption that the artist can portray "others" in a realistic and genuine way because she too is "other."