The following two excerpts have been taken from Visiting
Lecturer Irit Rogoffs fascinating talk during the opening week of The Institute™
- Hamilton as part of our Public Lecture Programme. The complete text of the lecture is
available by clicking on this button.
"How To Dress for an Exhibition"
Irit Rogoff
Director, Cultural Theory Programme
Goldsmiths College, London University
"
The pleasure of resemblance and repetition produces both psychic
assurance and political fetishization. Representation reproduces the Other as the
Same. Performance, insofar as it can be defined as representation without
reproduction, can be seen as a model for another representational economy, one
in which the reproduction of the Other as the Same, is not assured.
" (Peggy Phelan,
Unmarked)
Excerpt One:
On a bright and sunny New York afternoon, my friend
Abigail, my sister Daria and I set off to see the "Black Male"
exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. For those of you who
are not familiar with this project, this was an exhibition which
explored conjunctions of Blackness, of masculinities, and of representation
in a variety of media -- ranging from the dizzying heights of the painted
canvas to the lower depths of sports advertising. Curated by Thelma Golden
and accompanied by a distinguished catalogue in which numerous African
American writers, critics and analysts argued the critical issue of the
presence/absence of Black Masculinities in United States culture.
The exhibition was enormous, with more than 60 artists each showing
several works. After an hour or so the sheer taxonomy of the project
began to weary me. I had the sense that I was being shown every image of
every imaginable Black masculinity ever painted, drawn, sculpted,
photographed, videoed, digitalized, etc. As I dont do all that
well in situations of encyclopedic bombardment, I shifted my attention
from the work on display to the audience viewing it. The first pleasure
was to see so many Black men at the Whitney Museum -- one rarely sees
many Black men in mainstream museums in the United States. On occasion
one encounters middle class Black women in museums taking part in the
gendered economy of acquiring cultural capital. But on this Sunday
afternoon there were hundreds of men at the Whitney, deeply engaged
with the exhibition. The second pleasure was the realization of how
spectacularly dressed most of these Black male viewers were -- there
was every variety of clothing from the round caps and flowing sashes
of traditional tribal kanti cloth to Armani suits, to meticulously coordinated
and elaborate sports garb, to the black leather favored by the gay scene to
the tight dresses and fantastic make up of the transvestites. Every outfit
was fully thought out, perfectly presented and very strategically placed.
The third pleasure was the concentration with which the numerous, long
and elaborate texts which played a central role in the exhibition were
being read -- all of these exceptionally well-dressed viewers were almost
performatively reading the texts with the greatest attention to every detail.
What had happened here was that through a complex amalgam of sartorial
strategies, unplanned and uncoordinated, the viewers had in effect taken over
the exhibition space and put themselves on display within it, virtually
transposing the subject of the exhibition.
I want to use this moment as an opportunity to theorize participation
in relation to marginalized histories and the politics of emergent cultures.