Cherise Smith’s Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deveare Smith and John P. Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment each explore performance, identity, and the role that the body plays in both. More than isolated studies of artists, however, these texts are equally concerned with the discourses that surround them. Through her survey of four female artists working in performance from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Smith offers an analysis of the ideological, social, and artistic contexts in which these artists negotiate the boundaries of race, gender, and class. Bowles’s study of Adrian Piper’s work over a ten-year period (1965–75) similarly considers it at the intersection of multiple discourses—race, feminism, performance, phenomenology, and art history. Both Bowles and Smith explore the political potential of identity and identification, but what also comes to the surface is the dialectic of ideology and experience. It is the inherent tension between the psychic and the physical that all these artists, and the medium of performance itself, explore.

In Enacting Others, Smith begins from the personal. Recounting her own experience with a photograph of her white mother looking and acting “black,” Smith opens a line of inquiry into the visualization of racial identification (i.e., What does it mean to “look black?”) and the crossing of racial boundaries. These are concerns that persist throughout the book, as she looks closely at how the practices of specific artists explore and/or appropriate tropes of blackness. In four chapters and an epilogue, Smith explores the performances of four understudied contemporary U.S. artists: Antin, Lee, Piper, and Deveare Smith. Each chapter uncovers the artist’s manipulation of gender, race, and class and, perhaps more to the point, its embeddedness in political discourses around identity.

From the outset, Smith makes clear her investment in the specificity of language, first offering the term “politics of identity” in the place of the more contentious “identity politics.” Her reason for this, she claims, is to address “the myriad ways that identity is a valid and significant platform from which to motivate political action and to create and consume cultural products” (5). By focusing on the politics of identity, Smith attempts both to avoid the negative trappings of 1990s multiculturalism and to situate her study within a larger historical purview, beginning with the post-Civil Rights era Black Arts Movement, and ending with the questions of a post-identity framework. The plurality of this term also allows for Smith’s close study of the varying ideological, cultural, and political moments surrounding each artist’s work. She acknowledges throughout the text that the construction of identity is both fluid and discursive, and her attention to the particularity of each context and the multiplicity of identity is certainly a major strength of her book. Drawing on the fields of art history, cultural studies, legal studies, and performance studies among others, her ambitious work clearly and concisely outlines the artistic, ideological, and cultural concerns surrounding each performance, making it a fine addition to any art history, performance studies, or American studies bibliography.

In her first chapter, Smith looks at Piper’s performance of the Mythic Being, a performance persona begun in 1973 and created out of a combination of the artist’s personal experiences and stereotypes of blackness and masculinity in popular culture. Smith carefully balances between the sociopolitical and art-historical contexts of Piper’s performance, exploring at once the political investments of the post-Civil Rights era Black Freedom and feminist movements and the socially engaged, activist art associated with each. Aside from chronology, Smith argues, perhaps too briefly, that movements centered on black freedom and feminism were also united by the role trauma played in each. The Mythic Being engaged in the politics of each of these positions via the exploration of a collective black identity on the one hand and the use of feminist artistic strategies (e.g., “persona-play” performances) on the other. Smith illustrates the power dynamics involved in the negotiation of these discourses, as Piper played openly with stereotypes of both race and gender. Piper, she argues, used the disguise of the Mythic Being in search of a phenomenological experience of otherness, where she is both self and other simultaneously. This division is connected to the double consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois, but differs in its sense of autonomy and therefore its empowerment. Smith argues that most importantly the Mythic Being, “is a declaration of her own autonomy in making her own identity, a political assertion of artistic agency, and a pronouncement of the right to use aspects of her identifications in her artistic practice” (47). Such pronouncements, however personal, nevertheless rely on the public to witness and to re-inscribe these identifications. For Smith this brings into question the stability of Piper’s position as an “empowered artist.”

The relationship between the subjectivity of the artist and the public in performance becomes complicated in the work of Antin as well. In her analysis of the artist’s performance as the black ballerina Eleanora Antinova, the subject of the book’s second chapter, Smith makes a significant contribution to the scant scholarship available for this project. Many until now have been reluctant to address Antin’s tabooed blackface performance, preferring instead to study her work with gender archetypes in earlier performance persona such as the King or the Nurse. This proves an interesting paradox; like Piper, Antin’s work heavily depends on the audience in its politics of identity. Antinova indeed reveals a complex intersection of race and gender that begs further investigation. Smith explores the conditions and the implications of the artist’s minstrelsy, comparing her masquerade with that of actor Al Jolson and musician Mezz Mezzrow in the early twentieth century. Antin’s performance of blackness, she argues, is closely connected to the artist’s own Jewish identity. Unlike Jolson, for example, who took on a black mask in order to obscure all signs of his own ethnicity, Antin’s use of blackface and blackness allows her to insist on her own difference and position herself as the other “other.” The artist’s pen and ink works from 1975 (published by Antin in Being Antinova) also reveal Antin’s interest in the image of the black woman as one of “sensuousness, overt sexuality, and empowerment” (116) that is simultaneously threatened by marginalization. According to Smith, it is a similarly ambivalent and potentially utopian position that Antin wishes to occupy—as both self and other simultaneously.

Chapter 3 examines Deveare Smith’s constant movement between personae in the Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) project. Concerning this work, Smith argues, “difference is understood to be a raw material from which to make creative products, form social communities, build creative practices, and stage political action” (135). As in her other chapters, she provides a thorough analysis of the sociopolitical context of the Twilight project, focusing here on issues of multiculturalism and ethnography that were prominent in 1992. Many large cultural institutions engaged in the politics of identity through the early 1990s, producing notable exhibitions and cultural events that are considered groundbreaking investigations of identity, including: the New Museum’s The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), Deveare Smith’s own play Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn (1992), the University of California at Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery exhibition The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (1993), and of course the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition. As expected, Smith focuses largely on the last of these exhibitions and the writings of curators and critics who made every attempt to consider the political implications of the artists and the exhibition. In Thelma Golden’s catalogue essay for the 1993 Biennial, Smith finds a parallel with Deveare Smith’s own intentions for the Twilight project. According to Smith, the curator’s call for a move beyond essentialist notions of identity, which Golden would take up again more explicitly in 2001’s Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, corresponds to the “move toward humanism” that Deveare Smith tries to construct and critique in Twilight: Los Angeles (151). Like the other artists discussed in Enacting Others, Smith argues that Deveare Smith herself moves freely between identifications, at times using even her hair as a signifier of racial difference. She collapses binaries in an attempt to function as both self and other, author-agent and mediator. Yet for Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles does not quite succeed in this. Surprisingly, Deveare Smith’s “performance of those personae in a matrix of realism, transparency, and objectivity, performed under the guide of disclosure and impartiality, takes up the incongruous work of fixing and stabilizing identities rather than setting them in motion” (179).

The supposed stability and constructed nature of identity is a theme that many scholars have promoted in their readings of Lee’s Projects series of the late 1990s—the subject of Smith’s final chapter. In contrast to the many studies that read Lee’s performances as (to cite a few examples) tourist, exotic dancer, lesbian, drag queen, and schoolgirl as a form of effortless chameleonism and a celebration of postidentity colorblindness, Smith uses Lee’s Projects photographs to illustrate the very instability of “postidentity” ideology. Relying on the work of legal scholars Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, Smith argues that the supposed colorblindness of postidentity efforts does not in fact liberate the oppressed but instead “leaves the disempowered with even less power to challenge systemic oppression and trenchant hierarchies” (201). Smith continues her analysis of institutional discourses with her discussion of Golden’s abovementioned Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, providing a close reading of the loaded term: “post-black.” The “post-black” artist strives for recognition on the basis of individual skill or ability, rather than as part of some collective identity. Yet, as Smith argues, such a discourse also reveals more implicit structures of power at play—the dominance of white privilege on the one hand, and the emphasis on status and class rather than race on the other.

Throughout her discussions of the politics of identity, Smith keeps circling back to this theme of power. Who inscribes one’s identity? Does the privilege of the maker and her or his authorial voice sometimes challenge the ability to address the subject’s or the audience’s agency? Does an overwhelming emphasis on documentation versus process in performance shift the balance of power from audience to artist? What is perhaps most important is the inability to provide simple binary answers to such questions. As Smith illustrates, it is always yes and no. Such instability is perhaps, in Smith’s words, “testament to the slippery ambivalence that defines racialization and identity-making in the United States” (231).

Focusing exclusively on the work of a single artist, Bowles’s Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment offers a detailed view of an artist dealing with the contingency of identity, or “the ways in which race, gender, sexuality and class are not private but matters of social negotiation” (78). Over six chapters Adrian Piper explores the artist’s practice from her early conceptualism of the 1960s to her groundbreaking performance as the Mythic Being begun in 1973. Although both Smith and Bowles address this particular work, the latter’s text sets the critical context for Piper’s performance within her own practice as an artist, writer, and philosopher. Indeed, the major strength of his book lies in its comprehensive examination of Piper’s own words and works throughout. The inclusion of more than a decade of personal communication between Bowles and Piper make this a particularly fascinating study.

Although not within the period addressed in his main text, Bowles begins his introduction with a discussion of one of Piper’s most frequently cited works, Cornered from 1988. Typically understood as an aggressive diatribe on issues concerning race, Bowles instead reads her method of “direct address” as rooted in a history of Conceptual art. Piper’s emphatic repeating question—“What are you going to do about it?”—echoes a concern with the role of the viewer present in the discourses of Minimalism as well. What is most surprising about Bowles’s claims is not that Piper should be read within the discourses of Minimalism and Conceptual art—to which she undoubtedly belongs—but what it might mean to locate a black woman artist within such a history.

Like many other black and women artists of this period, Piper contended with a “crisis of invisibility” within mainstream arts institutions. Yet, the supposed object- and process-oriented approaches of both Minimalism and Conceptual art should have precluded such institutional racism; the rhetoric of each movement (and of Modernism in general) relied on an art distanced from the physical presence and thereby the body of the artist. Bowles asks: If Conceptual art was intended to explicitly address the conditions of everyday life, could there be a Conceptual art that addressed issues of race? Can a black woman perform the neutral role of viewer and artist required of Minimalism?

How Piper addresses the paradoxes of a black woman Conceptual artist are at the center of Bowles’s first two chapters. According to Bowles, Piper’s investment in these discourses was directly related to the artist’s interests in new ways of thinking about objectivity. Through a close reading of Piper’s own writings and works from the period, alongside those of her contemporary and friend Sol LeWitt, Bowles convincingly illustrates how Piper mobilized a specific critique of Modernism’s rejection of issues of race and gender. She began to view objectivity as a process rather than as a condition, to recognize that rational knowledge systems still managed to produce unique objects (an idea that could be connected to the distinct qualities of individuals). Works such as Hypothesis, for example, reveal Piper’s efforts to reconcile her subjective perceptions with objective knowledge as she documented her daily activities in physical space over the course of one fall in 1968. In her construction of the journals and photographs that comprise the work, Bowles’s reads Piper’s exaggerated attempts to objectify her personal experience as an attempt to move toward the universal espoused by both metaphysical philosophy and Modernism.

Piper’s commitment to metaphysical philosophy is a thread connecting her practice over the ten years of Bowles’s study. He discusses Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971) project—a documentation of the artist’s physical (via fasting and yoga) and intellectual (via a study of Kant) transformation—as simultaneously expression and critique. Attempting to follow Kant toward metaphysical transcendence, Bowles argues that Piper again makes herself an object—via these experiments and their subsequent photographic documentation—in a move toward universal knowledge, but her individuality as a black woman continues to assert itself. “Piper simultaneously lays claim to universality,” he writes, “while critiquing and historicizing its traditionally imperfect application” (208). The inconsistency between how Piper appears in the documentary photographs that accompany the work and how Piper believes she really is reveals a similar “failure of empiricism” (212). Subjectivity becomes a negotiation, rather than a fixed construct.

The use of the personal or the artist’s subjectivity has indeed been a dominant characteristic in Piper’s work, one that has escaped few critics and has lead to interpretations of her work as distinctly feminist or black as a consequence. The photographs from Hypothesis showing the artist performing daily activities in domestic space, or the inclusion of her father’s birth certificates in the installation of Cornered twenty years later, certainly seem to encourage such readings. Piper’s projects from this period, like those of the artists discussed in Smith’s book, also relied heavily on diaristic modes and first-person narratives in its documentation. Such strategies seem to simultaneously question the authority and truth of the image.

Yet, a major part of Bowles’s project involves the consideration of autobiography as a critical strategy. This may indeed be the reason behind his acknowledgment at the beginning of the book of his own whiteness. Piper, he claims, developed a mode of self-conscious performance in this period as a way to address racism and stereotypes, but also to expose the role of the viewer in the creation of these discourses. According to Bowles, as Piper moved into performance with the Catalysis series in 1972—the focus of the fourth chapter—the impossibility of her appearing as a neutral object became clear, and she too began to describe her work as autobiographical, even feminist. However, the inclusion of personal experience and autobiography was not that “of herself but of her self as an object” (171; emphasis added). The strategy of making oneself into an object for public consumption might be read in the works of other, particularly feminist, artists from this period as well. But it is the overall concern with objectivity, according to Bowles, that provides the bridge between Piper’s Conceptual art and performance.

Bowles’s final chapter takes on Piper’s performance as the Mythic Being. Piper’s performance (or perhaps parody) of black masculinity seems to take up many of the questions that Bowles charts throughout the text. As a somewhat ambiguous amalgam of racial and gendered stereotypes, the Mythic Being questions the physiognomic ways in which we fix others via racial identification. The Mythic Being also performs the intersectionality of identity, making clear that the meaning of race is always mitigated by the categories of gender, sexuality, and class. Most importantly this performance allowed Piper to present “herself as an object for inspection, but in a way that ultimately reveals less about the artist than about the viewer’s attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality” (253). Again, subjectivity becomes marked as a site of contestation.

As proven by Bowles and Smith, all these artists have used their practice to question constructions of both identity and difference, but what remains to be seen is whether the medium of performance offers the potential to collapse the distance between representational and political visibility in a unique way. These two books, however, have certainly provided the point of entry for such conversations.