Links
within this siteThis Web page is devoted to contemporary performance and installation artists who address the objectification of the non-white bodies in Western culture: Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Joyce Scott and Kay Lawal, James Luna, Renee Green, Lyle Ashton Harris and Renée Cox, and Grace Jones. Significantly, many of these performance artists use their own bodies as the most efficacious means to interrogate the history of "human exhibitionism" in Europe and the United States. By exhibiting their own bodies these artists effectively use performance art to bring to the fore the complex ways in which the displays of the non-white body have effected and continue to feed popular stereotypes about people of color in the Western imagination. The performances assert that racial and cultural difference and "otherness" in Western society are inscribed on the non-white body. By recalling specific histories of human display, the artists implore their audiences to recognize, reexamine, and transcend their intolerance and prejudice against persons who appear visibly different from themselves.
This page introduces a small, representative sample of artists who have
engaged this theme and hence serves as an introduction to this genre of
performance art. By way of organization, each of the links below take
viewers to one performance piece from one of the above mentioned. After
an image and a brief discussion, a statement from the artist reflecting
on their work follows, and each section concludes with a short bibliography
of further reading sources.
1. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña . Undiscovered Amerindians, 1992.
2. The Spectacle of the Hottentot Venus: The Thunder Thigh Revue's Women of Substance.
3. James Luna: Artifact Piece.
4. Renee Green: Revue 1990.
5. Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Valerie Cox: Hottentot Venus 2000.
6. Grace Jones: 1985 Performance in Paradise Garage
(also see Exhibiting Others in the West.)
Links
within this sitePostcolonial Studies at Emory
Introduction Authors Theorists Terms
& Issues(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J.
Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)