Coronating the fall program at Pioneer Works, multidisciplinary New York-based performance artist Narcissister presented the world premier of Voyage Into Infinity. The artist’s first large-scale performance commission since 2012, the artist was tasked with making use of Pioneer Works’ massive brick building in Red Hook, formerly an industrial factory. Rumored lo-fi magic, punk Lolitas and indoor pyrotechnics not withstanding – the show was quickly sold-out and presented to a riveted full house of an audience mid-September.
Voyage Into Infinity starts with quiet, eery silence as a triplet of Narcissisters crawl out of a dollhouse by candlelight, grows with a haunting live vocal score performed by Holland Andrews and ends with the rageful noise of a musical ensemble covering the Bad Brains’ song for which the piece is named.
I remember when Narcissister was simply ‘neo-burlesque’ as well as later on when she seemingly had to distance herself from the term in order to win the approval of certain art world gatekeepers. According to the title of David Everitt Howe’s recent essay, Narcissister’s Infinite Insides: The artist’s burlesque of race, class, and sex, her current status appears to be having both transcended the genre altogether and come back to haunt everyone who hasn’t. Narcissister confronts us with the terrible truth that all of our lives coexist in a carnival of racial, sexual and economic competition we didn’t consent to, nor can we escape. While the young feminist in me once wondered if there could be a post-race America, as well as why Narcisisster needed to hide behind the mask at all, the veteran in me hears her telling us all to take ours off – the invisible ones we wear everyday in an effort to assimilate and gain validation many of us don’t actually want.
In the essay, ‘FUCK YOU, PAY ME: The Pleasures of Sex Work’ Chanelle Gallant writes:
Sex work takes what women and feminine people of all genders are expected to do for free and monetizes it: be sexualized by cisgendered men, validate their masculinity, give them attention, smile, flirt, make them feel important and wanted even if it’s tedious, create intimacy and hold vulnerability, pour time and money into white middle class beauty standards, and have sex that’s mostly focused on men’s pleasure…
Is art free? I wonder. How about biting the hand that feeds you, does bitter aggression level the score? Looking back at my twenties, feminist performance art kind of felt like free nude angry women on demand (unpaid, but always in proximity to mega wealth). As Gallant extrapolates, patriarchy has long gone to war on our bodies and reproductive capacities, our minds and hearts, convincing us we are somehow on this Earth to validate white male privilege at our own expense. If contemporary womanhood swings somewhere between the dangerous peaks of sexual fantasy, unpaid caretaker, emotional savior and bird in a gilded cage – Narcissister succeeds at initiating a new conversation, one which is as embodied as it is unapologetic.
Excavating taboos and centering female sexual power, Narcissister is where I begin and end my feminist art history lectures when I teach undergraduates at SVA. Telling students we’re studying the ‘Other’ Art History, ogling high art vulvas, seemingly for hours. I foreground the discussion with a reminder that white male patriarchy is merely a blip on the timeline compared to the millennia of prehistory in which Matriarchy and Goddess-worship was predominant, a time when castration was as close as males could get to the Great Goddess. Phallocentrism is dead, we conclude – gazing at early works like Narcissister’s ASS/VAG besides the likes of Mickalene Thomas, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Marina Abramovic, Annie Sprinkle, Beyonce and Carolee Schneemann (also famous for pulling things out of her vagina but still paid less than a white male painter fresh out of grad school). It’s amazing to witness each semester as various students come to love/hate Narcissister. Like our own Mother, we want to both call her out and forgive her for the happy accidents and unforgivable mishaps she couldn’t anticipate, nor control.
As Pioneer Works’ text accompaniment for the piece begins, Narcissister’s Voyage comes to life “rooted in a fascination with states of impending collapse.” Yes, many of our former ways of doing things are being composted, if not collapsing dramatically like the pallets of Narcissister’s ridiculously monstrous Rube Goldberg counterfeit. Initially, I thought it was a big x-rated game of Mouse Trap®! A multifaceted kinetic installation covering the massive Pioneer Works space, the point of the machine is that one object (in this case, triggered by the guileless trio of Narcissisters) moves and tips off another object, setting off a chain reaction. We could call it a childishly elegant mockery of impending doom, tricked out as the three Narcissisters are in schoolgirl dresses before they strip down. Maybe it simply is a feminist revisioning of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), as the scholarly take informs. Maybe it’s a symbolic representation of the cause and effect of sex-negativity. The attempt to control eros, and its ironic effect of having contributed to predatory sexuality, violence, fear, trauma and religiously indoctrinated shame which disenfranchises and disavows the body, especially Black female bodies and gender non-conforming bodies.
I still remember when Narcissister openly admitted to not knowing what her own work was about and having to ask her Mom, or maybe that’s just a memory I created crying through her documentary The Organ Player, several times. As an older millennial member of a generation that has had to reparent in the face of institutional decay, it comes as no coincidence that the deeper meaning of Narcissister’s work seemingly emerged once her parents where both gone and she was able to honestly speak to their impact on her life and work.
Upon entering Pioneer Works, confronted with the oversized structural contraption, my eyes naturally gravitated toward a male figure in cement at the center of the empty stage. Why is that statue even there? I remember thinking. A concrete knockoff of the naked Olympian called Discobolus, his chiseled, lily-white muscles are forever poised to hurl his disc forward. A likeness Hitler monumentalized as a representation of the Aryan race in Nazi propaganda – in Voyage into Infinity, it not only becomes a stand-in for white supremacy, it’s the first object to topple down. After emerging from a dollhouse and creeping around by candlelight, Narcissister’s first act of creative treason is to tinker with the machine until Discobolus falls ceremoniously with a bang. I thought maybe some sexy narcissists were going to scale the flowing floor-to-ceiling silks, nah, they were just there to catch the dying patriarchy’s fall.
While David Everitt Howe’s essay about the artist succeeds in fleshing out how Narcissister’s work isn’t just self-objectification or post-modern bricolage – but a survivalist strategy in the face of gendered violence, racial bias and learning through trial an error how to take up space in a man’s world – let’s pick-up where he left off. His essay concludes with suggesting that the triplet of Narcissisters playing protagonist in the show were still somehow modeling their status as being “like pawns in a world over which they have no control except, perhaps, if they burn it all down.” Yes, my retirement plan hinges on societal collapse, no this isn’t my conclusion to the story, to the Voyage that is. The Voyage, as we surmise, is infinite. And the disc spins! (more on that down low)
Unlike the static authority figure glorified in yet another racist monument of a statue, my critical review of the show refuses to end in a cul-de-sac of nihilism, fear, grief or admission of powerlessness. While the Narcissisters played hard like adult children – mounting the machine as if it were a playset, hazarding upon one exciting experiment after another, upping the ante each time – it hardly ended with things falling apart, as the lead-in suggests. Call it a lesson in cause and effect, of natural consequences. That is, until Narcisister became the machine. Strapping herself in in several different positions, she flew through the air making circles forward and back, sideways and backwards. Yes fireworks blazed, but that was just the side show. Everything gloriously cohered when Narcissister spins her frenzied finale on a circular platform which had by now symbolically collided with the great disc of what’s his name in my mind. Spread eagle with a blazing firecracker firmly lodged in her vaginal canal, rotating faster and faster as the live hardcore band with Holland Andrews plays their final note. Nailed with a hailstorm of faux roses, the artist has arrived. Toppling the disc thrower was just a palate cleanser, bon appetite, female power is served and tonight it’s spiraling the house.
Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity isn’t about the inevitable explosiveness of suppressed rage or the endless suspense of life lived in submission to the old paradigm. If art is the last unregulated psycho-emotional terrain – ruled over by tricksters, reconciliation of opposites, openness to multiplicity of meaning and the inner child – then the problem with a feminist revisioning (aka revenge plot) is that it only further glorifies the system it attempts to dismantle. David Everitt Howe identifies how Narcissister’s power lies in “leveraging perceived exoticism” and “going ‘all in’ sexually.. to take control of a lopsided power dynamic.” As an audience, our power lies in perceiving with wise innocence, looking for something we know not. This isn’t about disassociation or playing Zaddy; but rather, a response to having seen most movements of consciousness raising fail to achieve any semblance of the new, whether unconsciously playing out the same power-over dynamics or serving performative activism and justice in drag.
The disk spins. To say that Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity is a reactionary gesture akin to knocking white male patriarchy off its pedestal – not Narcissister in the least! To call her a punk or even a prankster, that’s just too limited and masculine a domain. While Narcissister’s trademark guise – her mask – may be all gaudy, misconstrued female artifice – it’s therein that trenchant multiplicity of meaning, her refusal to conform, submit, please or deliver – that we find ourselves happening upon a truer meaning of femininity and feminism. Which is to say, Narcissister may have begun where the slogan ‘Fuck you Pay Me’ left off, but she doesn’t end there, she’s endless…
Yes, white male patriarchy froze the disc (we used to call this ‘Art’), froze the stars (western astrology is off-kilter), froze time (making us subservient to the fictional linear) froze commerce (they call them algorithms because they destroyed the organic rhythms of our virtual online communities). But in actuality, the disc spins. Which isn’t just some GODFIDENT answer but rather a friendly reminder, this too shall pass. Daring to center herself, such a big freaking NARCISSIST (!!) – ultimate threat to a system in which Black women, to use radical poetess Audre Lorde’s words, were “Never meant to survive.” While intersectional feminism calls us to shift the locus away from the most privileged voices and center the most oppressed, in reality, as Kevin Allred writes, “listening to Black women and their experiences exposes what the system cannot contain.” Namely, that America was founded on white profit at the expense of Black humanity.
After Discobolus falls, there is this haunting gesture whereby each Narcissister poses with the disc, flexing and contorting her body to perfectly model the ghosted disc thrower. Just as the disc spins, revealing a shifting and varied perception of reality, a frame outside logic, order, patriarchy – so too do our emotions flare up and simmer out like inner seasons. The Narcissisters keep telling their embodied stories, remixing them as needed, until they are no longer stories. No longer relevant to their sisters, or sisters’ sisters.
I must have been projecting my own fears when I worried Narcissister might become one of those one-note feminists – addicted to shock tactics and hot looks while falling back on liquidated fetish and language weaponized. For the record I think she successfully broke all those glass ceilings with her Organ Player documentary, and that she knew all along what she was doing. While Art has arguably never been free, it is one of the most ancient and honest forms of human-evolution. It’s no coincidence that since Narcissister became a household name, narcissism became the kerosene of pop psychology. Equally healing wounded survivors in droves while also getting batted back and forth between partners as a means of gender-justice powered extortion. Not only does our culture reward narcissists, the rise of social media has made playing along the spectrum a currency of survival. Narcissists are not evil, they just did not receive the right parental containment, the quality unconditional love they needed in early childhood. They endlessly gaze into the mirror of self because they have never felt seen. A clearer understanding of how Black female subjectivity and the lie of the American dream that was built on its back is only one prerequisite of consciousness raising. There’s no permission slip for existence. While it’s going to take a lot more than utopian dreaming to reboot the matrix, it feels like some of the artists at least are standing on fertile ground.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Narcissister’s Infinite Insides: The artist’s burlesque of race, class, and sex” by David Everitt Howe, BROADCAST, Pioneer Works (2024)
Kevin Allred, “MIXING LEMONADE, REMIXING AMERICA” in Ain’t I A Diva: Beyonce and the Power of Pop Pedagogy New York City: Feminist Press (2019)
Chanelle Gallant, “FUCK YOU, PAY ME: The Pleasures of Sex Work” in PLEASURE ACTIVISM: The Politics of Feeling Good, Written and Gathered by Adrienne Maree Brown (2019)
