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  • The Politics of FailureNao Bustamante's Hero
  • Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio)

I have to celebrate you, babyI have to praise you, like I should

-Fatboy Slim, "Praise You" (1998)

31 March 2006 (P.S. 1, New York City)

A performance of Nao Bustamante's Hero at P.S. 1 happens to coincide with my parents' visit. Reluctant to leave them alone for a night, I take them with me. This is the first time either of them has seen "performance art" and for a fleeting minute, taking our place in line with a hip crowd of downtown youth, I question the wisdom of this adventure. My father is in his 50s, white, lanky, and sometimes shabby in appearance. My mother is around the same age, Black/Japanese American (a Japanese immigrant), short and exhausted from a day of sightseeing. Performance art is not really their thing.

In the dark, we hear the serenely acrobatic, melancholic melody of turn-of-the-century French composer Erik Satie's piano work, Gymnopedie #1 (1888). Projected on to a screen at the back of the performance space we see lush shots of trees and sweeping scans of the [End Page 174] timeless forest, just as a small black being jumps into the camera's view. This figure, Bustamante's miniature poodle (Fufu) running on the forest floor, cuts the work's sobriety, releasing the audience's tension into laughter. My mother bursts into a loud and alarming laugh. The camera cuts to a forlorn young woman in a lacy dress. Her hair is long, flaxen, and wild, like the animalistic figure of Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting Woman with Parrot. We move between shots of the lost heroine and the running dog as she calls out in a mute cry supplemented by Satie's lilting, aerial pulse. Satie resisted traditional notions of time, signified by a body of composition that often features a lack of development, clear conclusion, or even time signature. His work is thus characterized by segmentation and repetition: a structural approach that is evoked in the fragmented sections of Hero with its reoccurring motifs and disruptive temporality. Bustamante's audience can only assume they are listening to one piece, when in fact they hear two in succession as the tone of the film shifts and the darker chords of Gnossienne #1 (1890) heralds the autumnal landscape's cut to a wintry expanse of white snow-Fufu still running and our heroine still lost.


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Figure 1.

Nao Bustamante, Hero, The Kitchen, New York City, 22 March 2005. (Photo by Andrea Geyer)

Bustamante portrays the third character, entering the frame with ominous makeup and melodramatic facial expressions. Her unkempt hair and dress mirror the lost maiden, creating a "wicked" foil for the heroine. The visual contrast of Bustamante's macabre makeup and Fufu's black fur against the white snow offer a visual portrait of conventions of 19th-century European and American narrative. Toni Morrison has pointed to a haunting dark presence within this body of literature, indicative of colonial and racial anxieties produced by the dark ("Africanist") presence of racial difference in the emerging nation (Morrison 1992). The contrast of dark and white, "evil" and "good," in Bustamante's film draws into relief the ways in which literary heroes in 19th-century narrative representation are imagined as set upon by dark forces. These encroaching shadows, Morrison argues, are in fact signifiers for the brown and black bodies that these heroes were, in actuality, enslaving, colonizing, and subjugating.

At this point, my mother is the only audience member still laughing, quite inappropriately. The audience's response has shifted from an uncomfortable silence to embarrassment so thick it weighs deep in the lungs. I'm burning with shame at our failure to perform as the "hip" audience of a sophisticated downtown performance. Against this shame, I simultaneously understand my mother's laughter as a form of critical engagement: I am reading my mother's laughter and Bustamante's performance as part of a social economy structured by what José Muñoz describes as "brown feelings." Muñoz argues for conceptions of ethnicity less as a...

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