Collapse of Oppositions
With the emergence of the great modern styles society has begun to fragment and form separate groups: “each group speaking a language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect and each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else”. Pervasive ideologies of the modernist art defined territories marked off by impenetrable borders and hierarchical structures. In order to subvert these established cultural, sexual and ethnic powers, in the 80’s and 90’s artists focused on destabilizing the border, which functioned as the center that upheld contradictions that lay to either side of it.
The method of differentiation, according to Foucault, is at the same time an operating condition and the result of every power relationship. “The system of differentiations”, he writes, “permits one to act upon the actions of others”. He emphasizes the importance of the element of freedom, as “power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free”. Insubordination and confrontation strategies on the part of the free principles are essential conditions for the existence of the relations of power. This relationship is true only if “the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused”. The success of the artists’ subversive actions that I will discuss lies not in the strategy of opposition, but in the strategy of confusion and superimposition. The deconstructive practices in the films of Sally Potter and Trin T. Minh-ha and the performances of Gomez-Pena and the Guerrilla Girls undermine the very mechanism of power by disorienting the layout of distinct positions between all notions of difference: men and women, American and Mexican, civilized and primitive, viewer and object, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, individual and society.
In 1984 in Arizona, Gomez-Pena collaborated with Roberto Sifuentes to present a performance installation that challenges the perception of the Chicano as the number one enemy in America. “The Temple of Confessions” combines pseudo-ethnographic diorama with the diorama found in the Mexican churches, in which Pena and Sifuentes present themselves inside plexi-glass boxes simultaneously as cultural specimens and holy creatures. These characters are constructed images of “border citizens”, both in literal terms (Pena grew up on the border, his family divided by the border line between the US and Mexico), as well as metaphorically as characters that exists in-between different realities and at the same time encompass elements of both. The notions of familiar borders are obliterated as the artists push the American culture to the margins and treat is as exotic and unfamiliar. Humor and parody binds together symbols, the exact original location of which is difficult to determine. The border citizens are dressed in snake boots, Aztec Cascabeles, authentic bones from audience members who were eaten, vest made from the leopard that was hunted on the streets of Tijuana; they use American flag, rifles, feathers, etc. A “reverse anthropology” is a term Gomez-Pena gives to his practice of representing a meeting of two or more cultures. Even the viewer’s responses in “The Temple of Confessions” are confused when their fears meddle with desires, repulsion mixes with excitement.
The performance group Guerrilla Girls also constructs hybrid identities as women wearing gorilla masks, while creating a media hype to bring public’s attention to the under- representation of women and minorities in the art world. When power relations are institutionalized, as in the case of a state or a museum, complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, bring into being its own regulations, carefully defined hierarchical structures and the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble. Exposing the corruption of the art world structures – secrecy, insider trading, and manipulation, Guerrilla Girls bring attention to the architecture of museums resting on close interrelationships between board members, collectors, critics, curators, and family relations. Guerrilla Girls choose a comical symbol to dispel the impenetrable separation between men and women – the phallic symbol of bananas. According to Lacan, phallus is a signifier for the cultural privileges and positive values, which define male subjectivity within patriarchal society but from which the female subject remains isolated. It signifies that thing whose loss inaugurates desire. The phallus, in other words, is a signifier both for those things that are lost during the male subject’s entry into culture and for those things that are gained. The use of banana by the Guerrilla Girls as the most overt phallic symbol in the hands of women subverts the notions of sexual power. It is at the same time seductive and humorous and initiates questions about the relational aspects of subjectivity, which comes into play through the principle of difference between the male and female and between the ‘You’ and the ‘I’.
Our consciousness is the self-assured center that also represents a borderline. Unsettling the center of structures and shifting the meanings of differences collapse the certitude of our consciousness. Both, Minh-ha in her film Reassemblage and Sally Potter in the film Thriller, create a disoriented reality that threatens our stable center of consciousness, which constructs and maintains ideas of otherness. We are thrown off balance by the contradictions in meanings and the actions of the characters, as well as by the contradictions within ourselves. The absence of the familiar cinematic reality, which is organized into explanation of itself, challenges our function as viewers and displaces our authority as viewers or participants. Sally Potter questions the power of the male artist through the reversal of roles, by posing herself as the hero: “What if I have been the subject of this scenario instead of its object?” The woman sits on the artist’s chair and is thrown into the light of the camera as the shadow of the observer passes over her. As part of her deconstructive practice, Sally Potter deliberately reverses perspectives as often as possible, in the process undoing opposed perspectives, showing that the two terms of an opposition are merely accomplices of each other: “For centuries she has been jumping into his arms over and over again”.
Absence of sound is used in both films to open the door for the viewer to participate in the game of reexamining the meaning of signs. Like the children in Reassemblage that blindly submerge their arm deep into the earth to dig something out of the mud, as viewers we dig into our subconscious in search of explanations, definitions, answers. “The habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign” narrates the voice of Minh-ha and emphasizes our impulse to conquer the world as we make sense of its images. Our act of looking is challenged by a notion of being looked at: “What I see is life looking at me”. The boundary between the inside and the outside, the surface of the lens that separates our immediate reality and reality within the film is a reflective surface and it is being repeatedly flipped: “I am looking through a circle in a circle of look”. Potter and Minh-ha employ questions as a way to penetrate the separation of the lens and the screen. “Can this be the fact?”, “Why?”, “What if..?” In fact, Reassemblage concludes with a question: ”Do you have a husband all for yourself?” The viewers are invited to step outside of their roles of passivity and to merge with the reality of the film: “I look at her becoming me, becoming mine. Entering into the only reality of signs, where I myself am a sign”
Interrupting the boundary between the audience and the artist both Gomez-Pena and the Guerrilla Girls employ confusing modes of performance – museum installations, news and talk show appearances, public lectures, and street and TV broadcast interventions. They are able to wear many costumes and mediate between being provocateurs, reverse anthropologists and citizen diplomats. Gomez-Pena comments on the significance of the on-going negotiation of cultural hybrids: “As artists we are accepted as extremists doing things that politicians cannot get away with. We can justify what we do as extreme esthetic behavior and we can always speak the truth.” And the truth that emerges from their practices is not a singular truth won with the argumentative language of physical combat. The work of these artists has to do with a kind of fluidity and movement back and forth, which resists meaning, a movement, of which the fundamental inner logic is the exclusion of the emergence of distinct themes. Perhaps, the truths resemble “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; truths that are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions…coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”
The significance of the work of these artists is in undermining a capitalistic consumption of images and their classification, privatization and abuse of images for the instituting of power structures. Their films and performances dissolve the saturated imagery of a stereotype and replace the cynicism that surrounds the way we look at images with a discourse of questions. Do images and ideas exist within cultural contexts, layered with all sorts of meanings that are inseparable from them, or is their existence universal and cannot be conquered or possessed or belong to any particular person, group, religion, ideology or political establishment? How do we explain their meanings through language? And are we ever free from participating in the power structures as long as we are bound to language as the means of our discourse? Perhaps, in the public realm of the World Wide Web, the border that determined the principle of difference through a set of power relationships has become a point of connectivity and has taken on the significance of the screen, “a switching center for all the networks of influence”.