There
is, in my opinion, only one conclusion that may be drawn from the idea that
the self is not given to us: we must create ourselves as works of art
– Michel Foucault
Two incidents: both concerning an individual I knew indirectly some years
back, a friend of a friend. Recognising him one day on a bus, I started up a
conversation. He was wearing a postman’s uniform and I assumed he worked for
the post office. We spoke of his job and our mutual friend. The second time
we met, a few months later, he had undergone a not inconsiderable
transformation and was now smartly dressed in a suit and sporting an
important-looking briefcase. We spoke again of our mutual friend and the
conversation quickly got around to his new career. It was at this point that
he let me in on his secret. He was no more a businessman, he confided, than
he had been a postman when I had met him previously. He assumed these, and
other, guises to explore how people reacted to him in different situations
and, on occasion, to gain access to places that would be otherwise barred to
him. At least, that was his explanation for such imposturing.
Imposture has long been used to attain an objective that might otherwise
have been impossible. In practice, an impostor can be both an impersonator –
literally, one who plays the part of an ‘other’ – or can start from scratch
and invent the other through the use of fictitious names and histories. What
equates both these types, however, is the manner in which they create an
illusion in order to trick and deceive those around them.
The act of imposture – whether in terms of impersonation, masquerade, or
mimicry – has been widely used by artists. In fact, most, if not all,
artists, are vicarious impostors who entertain a guise for a short period of
time before returning to their former roles. Rarely, however, does this
imposturing supplant the self, and it is this injunction that pinpoints one
of the crucial differences between an artist’s imposturing and an impostor
per se: the latter will go to extreme lengths to avoid being exposed,
whereas the artist, although also at pains to avoid immediate exposure,
endeavours to record his or her imposture. Being exposed after the event is
precisely the point, and to that extent the artist can be seen as something
of a ‘failed’ impostor. The function of imposture for most artists is to
effectuate a critique of the identitarian categories that inform debates
about gender, race and sexuality. The potential of imposture, both its
threat and its efficacious agency – performativity and transgression at once
– is its ability to usurp those very categories and foreground the gendered,
ritualised self as a discursively constructed and contingent proposition.
The humanist paradigm that sees the self in essentialist, fixed and
consistent terms is undermined by imposture – or, to put it another way, the
re-staging of the self as other irrevocably usurps the distinction to be had
between the two.
An example of blatant, not to mention problematic, imposturing in recent art
practice was evidenced in Katarzyna Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse (1999), a
large-scale video project first seen at the Venice Biennale and shown last
year at MOMA in Oxford. Kozyra, a Polish artist born in 1963, employed a
number of strategies to achieve her goal of filming in a men’s bathhouse in
Budapest, including disguise in her application of both a beard and a false
penis, subterfuge in her use of a hidden camera, and mimicry in the way she
fostered the gait and demeanour of the males around her. The viewer is
forced to confront a number of issues, not least the ethics of filming
people without their consent in what is, by its very nature, an
exceptionally intimate setting. The justification proffered for Kozyra’s
deception was that she wanted to record these individuals behaving
‘naturally’ and the only way to do that was through imposture. That the
subjects may have been able to ‘act naturally’ if aware of the camera is
beside the point insofar as they would undoubtedly have acted, to some
extent at least, in accordance with a discursively conditioned notion of
what ‘acting naturally’ means. In her re-presentation of her ‘self’ – the
posing of the self as a performative other – and her representation of the
subjects she surreptitiously films, Kozyra effectively underlines both the
constraints and oscillations that attend identity formation. To be accepted
as one of the boys, moreover, is to inquire into what exactly it is to be
one in the first place.
The anthropological urge to record and the importance of mimicry form the
basis of Nikki S. Lee’s series of impostures. Originally from Korea, Lee
ruthlessly adopts the garb, posture, and attitudes of groups such as punks,
tourists or yuppies in her adopted city of New York. In each of these
excursions, Lee assumes a role that is both an act of imposturing – passing
yourself off as someone you are not – and the result of rigorously observed
mimicry. These impostures amplify a number of concerns that revolve around
the fluidity of the signifiers we use to define race and sexuality, and
Lee’s many projects to date – including The Hispanic Project, The Yuppie
Project, The Punk Project and The Lesbian Project – reflect her own
preoccupation with the authenticity of a pre-given self that is both
immutable and fixed. Furthermore, the ensuing artefacts of these impostures
– snap-shot photographs of Lee in her various guises taken by other members
of the group – effectively underscores the role of the observer in
imposture. Lee’s companions are not so much innocent bystanders as
unwitting, and possibly unwilling, accomplices; whilst we, the viewer,
suspend our disbelief when we see her in the guise of a yuppie or a lap
dancer, and in doing so allow ourselves to be drawn further into the
deception. Imposture, that is to say, demands a participating audience to
attest to its verisimilitude, and all impostors, to a greater or lesser
degree, are exhibitionists who both flaunt their masquerade and yet are
careful not to look too out of place.
Looking out of place, in anthropological terms, is to court disaster, and
the role of mimicry is often seen as a protective gesture and a way of
blending into your surroundings: to remain unnoticed and camouflaged is to
survive attack and death. Belgium artist Ria Pacquée’s series of photographs
from the 1990s, entitled Madame, have taken this notion of ‘blending in’ as
a starting point for a number of incursions into everyday life. Playing the
part of a nondescript, bespectacled middle-aged woman, Pacqueé interposes
herself into ‘real-life’ situations. In one photograph, her inexpressive
face peers over the shoulder of Princess Anne at the National Garden
Festival in The Netherlands. In another, we see her earnestly quiz a
policeman or taking a keen interest in the show gardens on display. Whereas
Nikki S. Lee revels in adopting a series of impostures, Pacqueé makes a
virtue out of one consistent and wholly unremarkable figure and, tellingly,
it is often difficult to say who exactly the impostor is in these images
without comparing two or three of the photographs.
Effectively, the practice of imposturing, far from being a strategy for
‘blending in’, can also be seen as a sign of conceptual and visual
disruption. Throughout his engagement with, and assumption of, the role of
Victorian dandy, Yinka Shonibare has brought into focus questions concerning
race and representational veracity. Photographs of the artist in the role of
a dandy in the Dorian Gray (2001) series, shown last year at Stephen
Friedman Gallery in London, present the viewer with a figure often
affiliated with imposture. Associated with theatricality, self-performance
and artifice – and the concomitant dissolution of an authentic self – the
dandy occupied a position in Victorian culture that was both within the
social order and yet on its margins. Moreover, the conspicuous presence of
Shonibare, a black artist performing a role usually associated with a white
male, highlights the elision of Victorian visual representations of
blackness in guises other than those aligned with tropes of inferiority and
primitiveness. The very stratagems employed by historical representation –
including literary discourse and photographic ethnography – to maintain
racial distinctions are disturbed here in a portrayal of blackness that
punctures the extensive, though exclusionary field of historical
categorisation.
In the last century, the notion and practice of imposturing was similarly
employed by Duchamp in his ‘Rrose Sélavy’ persona and, more recently,
throughout the work of both Sophie Calle and Cindy Sherman. The latter’s now
seminal series of early photographs Bus Riders (1976), depicted Sherman in a
succession of disguises and poses including that of a truculent teenager, a
businessman, a bewildered college student, and a middle-aged housewife
replete with bulging shopping bags. Whilst these roles could be read in
terms of imposture or impersonation, they could equally be seen in terms of
masquerade, a term long associated with debates that evolved out of feminist
discourse in the 1960s and the move that saw the artist becoming the artwork
in performance art throughout the seventies and eighties.
Between the years 1975 and 1980, American artist Lynn Hershman created a
simulated persona that went under the name Roberta Breitmore, an alternative
personality that enabled the artist to explore how people reacted to her as
an autonomous other. Roberta, in possession of her own driving licence and
other legal definitions of her identity, engaged in ‘real-life’ situations
through, for example, placing ads in a local newspaper looking for a
room-mate. The people who replied to these ads became part of the fiction
that was Roberta Breitmore, whilst she, for her part, became a concomitant
part of their reality. Towards the end of Roberta’s life span, Hershman
became concerned that her ‘other’ was becoming more and more her self, and
the guise of Roberta Breitmore was eventually taken up by a number of other
people before being de-commissioned.
Inspired by Foucault’s articulation of so-called ‘technologies of the self’
– the discursive and material alliances that produce the subject – Judith
Butler has long argued that the binary politics that attend discussions
concerning identity formation – the fixity of ‘male’ and female’ identity –
are inevitably undermined if we consider gender as a performative gesture: a
transitive and tentative inconstant that adjusts and alters in keeping with
its circumstances. Adrian Piper’s creation of her ‘Mythic Being’ in the
mid-seventies also registered this ideation of femininity and identity per
se as masquerade. In posturing as a male subject, Piper assumed a gait and
demeanour that were, for her, inherently male. Thinking like a man, being
sexually aroused by women for example, was a way for Piper to re-examine how
she thought as a woman and the extent to which her self-identity was a
performative act defined more by the conditional demands of the society she
lived in than any innate sense of her feminine self.
Although taken aback by the revelation that my ‘businessman/postman’
associate was nothing of the sort, and slightly resentful that I had been
fooled, that act of re-staging the self through imposture – the process of
othering or estranging the self – is precisely the instant that underscores
the fragility of identity and the strategies that artists pursue as they
investigate the slippage between notions of self and other. Rather than
inquiring, however, into the self’s relationship to the other – an already
over-used and much abused paradigm – it is perhaps more productive to ask
what happens when the self, through the practice of imposturing, becomes its
other: what, in short, are the implications for identity formation if our
others are always already our selves.
Anthony Downey is currently completing his PhD at Goldsmiths College, London and is the Programme Director on the part-time MA (Contemporary Art) at Sotheby’s Institute, London