Express yourself

In celebration of the newly launched Art, Race and Gender collection, our latest blog explores identity, performance and performativity, as well as concepts of self-expression and what we mean when we talk about authenticity in art.

Discover the free-to-read chapters featured from across the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub, including Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts and Bloomsbury Design Library.

Image credit: © Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Containing multitudes

In Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics, Claire Raymond examines ‘the idea of a performative self’. She describes this as ‘a self produced not by an inherent truth of one’s soul but instead by cultural forces’. Exploring ‘alternative performances of self for women’, Raymond looks at artworks from the 1980s onwards, by the likes of Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Nikki Lee, and Zackary Drucker. Her chapter on ‘Performance’ interrogates what alternative performances of the self are available, and how those performances challenge or affirm cultural forces.

Visual art is uniquely placed to explore ‘alternative performances of the self’. If you can see it, you can be it. Visual artists are in the business of envisioning and visualising, of representation. Judith Butler, in her seminal book Gender Trouble (1990), describes how cultural forces and our interaction with them constitute identity. Butler writes of social theory with post-structuralism in mind, but the implications of her work, in particular on ‘performativity’ as it concerns aesthetics, are far-reaching.

Suddenly, Butler suggests, we aren’t limited to inherent truths. Rather, identity, as an emergent portrait of our behaviour, is altogether more diverse, vibrant, and complex – and perhaps as troublesome and contradictory in its possible permutations as expression itself.

How to be an artist

To perform at all, artists must earn a living. Alison Branagan, in The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers, discusses the importance of ‘making creativity pay’. Art as a kind of performance is, in this sense, also work – an act of labour. Branagan includes a list of artists detailing how each of them paid their way, whether through scholarships, inherited wealth, or forms of patronage. The list is enlightening. ‘Jeff Koons,’ she writes of the American conceptual artist, ‘earned a great deal of money as a commodities trader in Wall Street before pursuing his venture as a controversial artist.’ Indeed one wonders if the pursuit of courting failure, of experimenting with the limits of the self controversially, is a luxury for those who can afford to fail.

Certainly there are kinds of performance available to some and not others. This can depend as much on one’s means or class as it can any other aspect of identity, which in itself so often ignores the intersectional complexities of who we are. What does it mean to be authentic? In other words, to perform authentically? For Giovanna Zapperi, writing on Carla Lonzi, the Italian critic and feminist activist, art became ‘a social relation’ whereby ‘authenticity was, in the end, impossible.’ It is the essential push-pull of her chapter ‘The making of a feminist subject: Autonomy, authenticity and withdrawal’, where we are left with the questioning the imperative to be authentic. Authentic to whom?

Performing authentically

It’s possible that our demand for authenticity is, in this respect, unanswerable. This was, at least, Lonzi’s experience. Searching the term ‘authenticity’ in the new Art, Race and Gender collection, draws 124 chapter entries across 77 titles.

Lynne M. Swarts, when navigating the problematics of authenticity in literary, cultural, and aesthetic theories, places ‘the word “authentic” or the idea of “authenticity” . . . in quotation marks’ throughout her book. The caveat is useful to delineate the mercurial and shifting claims, assumptions and stereotypes ‘authenticity’ often labours under, whether aesthetic, colonial, or institutional.

Derek Conrad Murray begins his chapter on ‘Queer Aesthetics in the History of African American Art’ with an anecdote by African American filmmaker Melvin van Peebles: ‘When I sent my book to American publishers, they said, “It’s very good, but it’s not black enough.”’ The full anecdote skewers the demand and commodification ‘(of the black artist) to speak against the perniciousness of racism,’ as Murray puts it, ‘while also contending with the white cultural thirst for images of black deprivation’. What follows in his analysis is a discursive, enlightening and complicating idea of queer African American identity and art.

Elsewhere, Celeste Ianniciello explores the work of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir in her book Migrations, Arts and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean. Resisting stable forms of articulation constituting identity, Celeste writes of art and the diaspora:

Diaspora is where the politics of gender, class and race form together a new, powerful and unstable articulation that does not provide easy answers, but raises “new questions, which proliferate across older frames of thought, social engagement and political activity” (Hall 2012).

Possessing the power to engage these questions, across geographies and borders, art can connect ideas and identities in new and powerful ways, as a cultural expression of diasporic identity. The unstable articulation of works, like those by Emily Jacir, highlight an imperative need for art to be plural, mobile, and encompassing of intersectional possibilities which defy easy answers.

Content linked to in this blog will be free for a month after the post date.

For full access to the new Art, Race and Gender collection on the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub, visit our Librarians page for information on trials and purchasing.

Image credits: Dusan Stankovic via Getty Images, Nan Goldin courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Sycikimagery via Getty Images, Dedraw Studio via Getty Images.