The following two excerpts have been taken from Visiting Lecturer Irit Rogoff’s 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 don’t 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.