Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith by Cherise Smith (review)

Art historian Cherise Smith offers a close reading of four contemporary artists whose works occupy seminal moments in the historicization of the politics of identity. Smith examines how Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith occupy "liminal spaces," or moments in which their dual identities as "self " and "other" are simultaneously present in their art. While such factors as age, gender, class, politics, and sexuality inform her analysis, Smith is principally interested in how these artists manipulate their corporeal presences through such visual signs as passing, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag in an effort to slip between boundaries of race and ethnicity. Considering how power dynamics between artist and audience are complexly negotiated, Smith points to Antin's, Lee's, Piper's, and Deavere Smith's art as evidence of work that occasionally reinforces identity as a "fixed" and "stable" concept but also productively illuminates the "arbitrariness, constructedness, and fluidity of identity and identifications" (10).

Smith's study begins with Adrian Piper's Mythic Being project, in which Piper performed a fictionalized male persona, the "Mythic Being," from 1973 to 1975. Smith situates Piper's work within the liberation movements that followed the black freedom struggle of the late 1950s and 1960s. In this context, Piper's work straddles communal identification, which these liberation movements promoted, and individual identity. Donning an afro, facial hair, and sunglasses, and often seen smoking a cigar, the Mythic Being personified stereotypes of black masculinity and challenged his audience to confront their feelings of hate and fear. In one incarnation of the project titled "The Mythic Being: Getting Back" (1975), Piper staged an assault by the Mythic Being on a white man. Captured in a series of photographs, the visual images reveal Piper's dual identities of "other" (the Mythic Being) and "self " (the artist). Indeed, Smith interprets Piper's simultaneous presence of "self " and "other" throughout the Mythic Being project as evidence of an artist who "can use the politics of identity to her advantage by assuming the authority to make art and identity" (77).

Eleanor Antin's Antinova project of the late 1970s dabbled in feminist art traditions of the 1970s, often described as "essentialist and biological-determinist," as well as the "theory-oriented and intellectually heady art" of the 1980s (83). In October 1981, Antin assumed and lived the persona of Eleanora Antinova, the Russian ballerina, by darkening her fair skin so as to appear black, wearing stereotypically feminine apparel and makeup, attending art gallery showings, and displaying fake production photographs of Antinova in a public museum. Antin's utilization of the politics of identity is most clearly articulated in Being Antinova, a published collection of the project's photographs and the artist's self-narrative. Antin acknowledges exploiting stereotypes of blackness, whiteness, Jewishness, and femininity as a means of demonstrating how identity is "open to manipulation" (109). This "openness" divided critics, Smith notes, who debated whether Antin embraced or rejected her own Jewishness, and how, if at all, her work linked Jews and blacks historically. Smith maintains that by constructing herself as "doubly 'other,' " enacting both the "ultrafeminine ethereality associated with white womanhood" and the "power, sensuousness, and glamour . . . of the black woman" (132), Antin was able to challenge racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes, assert her own Jewish identity, and reinforce the historic link between blackness and "otherness."

Turning to the 1990s and the demise of "multiculturalism" in American culture and the art world, Smith studies the 2000 film Twilight: Los Angeles and the problematic ways in which Anna Deavere Smith inserts "self " into representations of "others." Based on her 1992 one-woman stage play in which Deavere Smith performed excerpts of interviews she conducted with individuals of divergent races, ethnicities, and classes in the wake of the Rodney King verdict...