#decenteringlines

The moment of erotic contact caught here is similarly fraught. This doesn’t look like a wet, sloppy kiss or a deep, I-want-you kiss but rather a moment of stiff-tongued penetration. A plunging of the tongue into the black, seemingly endless void of the other’s mouth. And the figure on the right, in turn, makes no reach toward the other. Their arms lie flatly down along the sides of their body. Their eyes stare worriedly, directly into the figure before them.

Critic Joel Smith, analyzing Ali’s Greenheads series (which the painting that Nana talked about belongs to), noted that the Greenheads, which are similar to Ali’s other characters, seem to have been “designed for maximum unlovability. Their shrimp-slim torsos are not huggable, heroic, sexy or even gendered. . . . The chocolate brown color of their limbs provide one of the Greenhead’s few tangibly human traits.” (3) Smith claims this in service of his argument that the series operates as a “bad cartoon of the human condition.” (4) By being human but not quite, categorizable but not quite, the figures for him produce a distancing effect that makes viewers reflect upon preconceived categories like race, class, and culture. So, if we start to read blackness into these images, because of say, a basketball-like object, we are also forced, through the distancing that Smith identifies, to ask ourselves why. To reflect upon, as Michelle Wright notes, the “bizarre logic of skin-deep racial bias.” (5) This movement toward self-reflection, for Smith, is the success of the Greenheads: they help us deconstruct our destructive and socially learned ways of seeing.

But what would it mean if we chose to read The Kiss against the scariness that Ali identifies and the disidentification that Smith proposes?  If instead of reading these figures for what is Other, or "Alien in a bad way"—for what is scary, ugly, and unhuggable—we saw these figures as smokingly hot cyborgs? From this perspective, their headdresses could become, a la Octavia Butler, erotic sensory tentacles. Organs of pleasure instead of “codes of culture” or “traditional dress.” In this sense, “Here comes the Kiss” could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Like, “Here comes The Kiss, who just asked me out on a date!” or “The Kiss just grabbed my ass!”

We could read against Smith’s production of distance and disidentification and say that such an argument, rather than being convincing, instead unwittingly reveals his own inability to envision a world that does not abide by the very norms he wants to deconstruct. These figures, for him, are always doomed to fail the norms of heroism and huggability. But don’t worry, he says, this failure produces a distancing effect and therefore is terribly instructive for us! In this line of interpretation—which I might add epitomizes much of the commentary on Ali’s works—there is a resistance toward seeing outside of our current historical and contextual norms. There is a resistance toward envisioning new—or simply different—norms and ways of being and seeing. A resistance toward the possibility that these figures could ever be seen as desirable.

But what I want to do here is not simply point out that there are several ways to read these figures but also to reflect upon the powerful dynamic (perhaps dialectic?) of disidentification and identification that they construct. Ali on the one hand tries very hard to construct a world that avoids the signs and symbols we normally use to represent humanity—the genders, races, classes, and the potentials of bodies she depicts are in many ways very hard to read. Yet on the other hand she calculatedly uses a few, single signs and symbols that have incredibly powerful connotations and that we think we know—for example in her use of headdresses, and in other images in her work, nooses and Klu Klux Klan-esque hoods. 

Thus, Ali’s images draw us into a dance—between identifying with the figures and also seeing them as Other, between recognition and non-recognition, between desire and hesitation or even repulsion. Regardless of whether or not we ultimately decide to stop this dance and declare that the figures are this or that, the figures’ resistance to easy categorization necessarily provokes movement between—at least during the time that we're trying to decide what’s going on in this world. In their resistance to categorization, they ironically elicit a deep desire to categorize. (That must be representative of a Native American headdress! Or, that must be an allegory for white supremacy in the US South). And this even if we end up deciding that their category is “uncategorizable.”

And is this the image’s bossiness? Who has the control here? Us with our powerful repertoire of references that we pathologically read into the images or the images themselves, who force us into this relationship? Are we Kissing or being Kissed? Is The Kiss a real, embodied figure or rather a stand in—a position holder—for our own imaginings and projections? And as a final question for consideration, I wonder what would it mean to step out of this dance between identification and disidentification into a hermeneutics, possibly queer, that asked other questions? A hermenutics that valued, for instance, questions of relationality and collectivity over the lines and boundaries of identity and identification and their associated categories? 

By Jess Dorrance

References:

(1) See inIVA, Jan. 17–Feb. 24, 2007, http://www.iniva.net/laylah/.

(2) Allen, Isaac. “Here Comes the Kiss: A Conversation Between Laylah Ali and Allan Isaac.” Massachusetts Review 49:1-2 (2008): 154.

(3) Smith, Joel. “Hanna Barbarity.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 6 (2002): 26.

(4) Ibid., 29.

This evening is organized in cooperation with the DFG graduate school Gender as a Category of Knowledge at Humboldt University Berlin. The research group "Visual Culture" is also facilitating Coco Fusco's talk "Torture and the Feminine Touch"on May 31, 2012 at the ICI-Berlin.

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