JEFFREY DEITCH INTERVIEWS NARCISSISTER Narcissister, Untitled Self-portrait Series (New York), 2012-present. Courtesy the artist Narcissister, Untitled Collage Series (Kingston, NY), 2020-2021. Courtesy the artist
It would be a disservice to simply call Narcissister a performance artist. Donning her trademark mask, which harkens something between the visage of a blowup doll and a killer sex robot, Narcissister utilizes ingenious costume design, acrobatics, contemporary dance, and strip tease in a radical reclamation female power, and smashes every stereotype along the way. In the following interview, Jeffrey Deitch gets to the heart of Narcissister’s enduring enigma. JEFFREY DEITCH The beginning of Narcissister. I think we should start with that story. NARCISSISTER Okay, do you want to tell it? DEITCH So, I always wanted to establish a platform at Deitch Projects where people coming from different cities, different countries, wanting to get involved in the New York art community, could just show up at our openings and connect with people. And sometime around the year 2000, you began showing up at our openings. Just after you had moved to New York from San Francisco. NARCISSISTER Yes. DEITCH I remember seeing you a few times and you were so distinctive. I've always been fascinated by people who are able to embody their artistic vision in their persona. And that's what you were able to do. After three or four times, I said, I have to introduce myself. So, we started talking and you told me a little bit about yourself, that you'd been a trained dancer, and that you were supporting yourself by being a window dresser at Ricky's, which was such an important New York institution. NARCISSISTER Ricky's was a locally owned small chain store of wild wigs, cosmet160
ics, and costume makeup. And they had really playful branding and window displays. I approached them offering my window dressing services. It was really fun to work with them for a few years. I imagine I invited you to come see them with all sincerity, as if you would find something like that to be artful. I was young and unjaded at that time. DEITCH But after a few times that you came into the gallery, a project came up. The fashion photographer, Steven Klein, proposed an art show. He had a lot of success in his field with Vogue and other publications, but what he really wanted was artistic recognition. He wanted his work to be in a real art gallery, or in a museum, and that wasn't easy for him to accomplish. So, he asked if I would show his work. He proposed an exhibition of his photo collaboration with Madonna. I looked at the work and said, “Well, you know, our gallery doesn't just show photographs. We have to have something more engaging, more active.” He said, “How about we turn this into a collaboration with Madonna, and she gets involved—we’ll bill it as Madonna and Steven Klein.” Madonna liked the idea, and she ended up getting very engaged NARCISSISTER & JEFFREY DEITCH
with the project, even to the point of personally editing the press release that I wrote—down to the typeface, such detail. Everything had to be perfect for the show. Steven made great contributions to the gallery. The facade used to be a nondescript red brick, and he said, “No, no, we have to paint it silver, like the Andy Warhol factory,” which we kept to this day. But the one detail left was we needed the right person at the reception desk—somebody with a lot of style, who would fit in with the whole project. And that’s how you became the receptionist for our legendary Madonna and Steven Klein exhibition. NARCISSISTER I remember that I had to come in so that he could approve my look. There I was with my thrift store chic. I wasn't quite sure what he would think about me, but I did come in, and he did approve my look, and I did become the gallery sitter for that Steven Klein Madonna show. DEITCH Then there's this project that came up with an artist named Jean-Pierre Khazem, who had proposed an exhibition that involved setting up a live scenario with a model wearing a Mona Lisa mask, standing naked on a pedestal, in the middle of an empty gallery, with a shaft of light directly on top of the model. The artist came over to the Madonna and Steven Klein exhibition, and we were talking near the reception desk about who we're going to get as a model. You were listening and said, “I'll do it. If I can wear a mask.” That’s how it started. NARCISSISTER Then, I was a model in Jeremy Scott’s live show that you did. I think that was maybe before the Mona Lisa show. So, there were a few things that gave you some indication that I could be a good model for the Mona Lisa piece. DEITCH And it was not easy work because the mask wasn't designed for comfort. It was not an easy proposition for you, but you were brilliant. I would at times look in and I'd just be amazed. You were totally still, completely professional. But, you know, you had some serious dance training, which allowed you to do that. So, this is a good time to ask you about your background as an Alvin Ailey dancer. NARCISSISTER Yes, I moved to New York the day after I graduated from Brown UniversiAUTRE MAGAZINE 12 The Doppelgänger
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ty to study on a scholarship at the Ailey School for a year. That was in 1993. As part of the scholarship program, I was selected to perform a couple of times for a piece called “Memoria” with the main company at City Center. I wasn’t an Alvin Ailey company dancer, but I performed with the company a few times as a student. Once I finished my training, I started working as a professional dancer, mostly in Europe, so my training as a dancer is very present in my Narcissister project. DEITCH Some months after your performance in the Mona Lisa project, you gave me a call and said you had been developing a very interesting performance project and you'd like me to come out and see it. This was before we could easily send videos over the internet. To watch it, I would have to actually go to your studio and you would play me a video, or show me. And your studio was someplace out in Brooklyn, or an hour-long trek from lower Manhattan. I said, “Oh, okay, I'll get there,” but I never got there. Then you asked me again and I said, “Well, I'll come,” but I unfortunately never got to your studio. And then, you called me up many months later and said, “I'm taking my performance to this exciting new space called The Box in Lower Manhattan.” I thought, great I'll see it there. But then it turns out that performances at The Box don't begin until after midnight. NARCISSISTER Well after midnight. DEITCH Like two in the morning. And so, I'm a runner—I cannot stay up because I get up early to go running and I need energy. Unfortunately, I never got to see those early performances at The Box until a Japanese client of mine insisted that I go with one of his clients from Japan, who wanted an evening out on the town in New York. And because there were some big art commissions involved, I said okay. And I'm there past midnight. And I remember I asked one of the hostesses if Narcissister was performing. I didn't know the name Narcissister yet. I used your civilian name. She said, “Oh yes—she's going to be on about two in the morning.” I was exhausted, but I stayed. We were right in the front row. And you come out and I must say it was one of the most astonishing sights I've ever seen. Your performance was so totally transgressive. I couldn't believe that this beautiful practice was being done in front of all these drunk people with $15,000-a-table bottle service—it was a crazy scenario. And, well, that was my first Narcissister experience. I was astonished in many ways—the direct line from your performance in our gallery, and how you had developed it, and ran with it. NARCISSISTER My role being Mona Lisa in that performance absolutely did plant a seed of what was possible for me. And also just to 162
behold all the wonderful work and events that were happening at your gallery that stretched the boundaries of what is considered art—it gave me this idea of how I could turn my experience into an art project. I could bring everything that I had done, not only my dance training, but also my window display design skills. And then I had a visual art practice. That's another thing that maybe you forget: I had been making art for a long time, mainly 2D works. And you very generously gave me the keys to this warehouse—a studio space in Williamsburg. I was making these spray paint images that I would wheat paste around town. I would ride around late at night on my bike with my wheat paste posters and a bucket of glue. I had a show at a store in SoHo and you bought one. That was my first experience selling a piece of art to somebody. DEITCH And around that time, you connected with Santigold—you designed her album cover with art from that series. NARCISSISTER Absolutely. She saw some of the work that I had done when she was living in Brooklyn at the time, and she asked me to design her first album cover. I ended up art directing all of her visual material during that phase of her initial big success. All of her branding I designed, and I took the photographs of her that were used. DEITCH You've done something that is still not fully accepted by the elite art world—this blurring the boundaries between entertainment type performance at a commercial venue and serious, artistic aspirations. What you do at The Box is the same as a performance in a museum. NARCISSISTER Right. That hasn't always been easy. My history as an artist is long. I knew since I was a child that I wanted to be an artist. I asked my parents to enroll me in summer art programs at Otis-Parsons in LA. I would take the train by myself from San Diego to Downtown LA. My parents didn't want me to go to art school for college, so I went to Brown, but I took classes at RISD, and I made friends there. Kara Walker was at RISD when I was at Brown. We were in a performance, or two, together. She came to Brown to see a solo exhibition I did as a student and was a fan of the work that I was making then, which were contemporary quilts inspired by my study one semester with Faith Ringgold at UC San Diego, where my father was a professor. I didn't strike upon something that was singular until I started performing, and until I created this persona of Narcissister. I think that my work is seen as "low brow" in some ways. And it's confusing because it's not easy to define. The fact that I continue to perform at places like The Box is a bit confounding to the NARCISSISTER & JEFFREY DEITCH
art world because it is an entertainment venue, it’s a nightclub, and leaves one wondering how rigorous my practice is. But I'm in this for the long haul. In addition to being titillating at times, in addition to being funny, my practice can also sit within serious lineages of art. DEITCH I admire that you are taking control of your own career and image through this extraordinary film you created, Organ Player, which presents a very profound picture of who you are as an artist and where you came from. You certainly reinvented yourself as Narcissister, but the film is all about your extraordinary family background, which has very much molded who you are as an artist. NARCISSISTER My family, and being mixed-race, is a huge part of my work—the politics of my project, the visuals of my project. It’s where I learned firsthand how slippery identity is. My mother was Sephardic Jewish from Morocco. So, she's African and because of that people would assume she was my Black parent. It's hard to define her. People would hear her accent and say, where are you from? She would say, “I'm Jewish.” She grew up in Tangiers. Her father was Spanish. Her mother was Turkish. Her parents were first cousins. My father was African-American from Watts. The oldest of eight children. He was an intellectual and felt himself to be from a young age. He defined himself as such. In contrast to my mother, he seemed easy to define: he's a Black American man. But that's not the identity that was central to him. The identity that was central to him was being an intellectual and being a scientist. And he struggled with being pigeonholed for most of his life. Emotionally that really took a toll on him. My parents met in New York City in the ‘60s, at Columbia University. My father was there on a scholarship to study physics as a grad student. My mother had come to this country with her family and got a menial job working in the registrar's office at Columbia. Her boss noticed how gifted she seemed. She was an awful receptionist, but she was always reading and talking to the people about their intellectual pursuits. So, he arranged for her to enter graduate school at Columbia based on the transcripts that he ordered from her French Lycée school in Morocco. And that's where she met my father. DEITCH So, tell us about Organ Player. NARCISSISTER Narcissister Organ Player is a feature length film. It's a hybrid doc and performance film. It talks about my complex family history, not just my parents' history, but their family histories. And how my complex family history compelled me to create the Narcissister character. The film premiered at Sundance in 2018, which was a huge honor. The AUTRE MAGAZINE 12 The Doppelgänger
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European premiere was at the Locarno Film Festival. Again, my parents were a huge part of my life. I was very close with both of them and when they died it had such a big impact on me. As I have since I was a child, in making this film I turned to my art to make sense of the events in my life, to make sense of the world around me. DEITCH I want to follow up on something that intrigues me, which is your studies with Faith Ringgold. Were you a high school student when you encountered her? NARCISSISTER While I was a student at Brown, I unexpectedly went home to San Diego from my junior year abroad in Paris due to a dance injury. I finished the year at UC San Diego where, again, my father was a professor, and Faith Ringgold was teaching in the art department. So, I took two classes with her. Finding her art just meant so much to me. I had been sewing since I was a child. And the way that Faith Ringgold combined fabric and words and politics, and that it was craft, was a revelation to me. There's a lot of craft in my work, and I know that's not always so fashionable in the art world, but I'm not ashamed to say that I think craft is important, and can be political, technical, and conceptual. The fact that she was combining all these things was just mind-blowing. She is a very powerful woman—tons of dignity, quite intense, wonderfully fashionable, and intellectual. She became a heroine of mine and I started making quilts. Those are the pieces that Kara Walker saw when she came to my show at Brown. And that makes its way into Narcissister—I sew all of my costumes. That's one of my favorite aspects of the project—to fabricate these costumes, and to engineer them so that they can morph into different things very quickly and very gracefully. DEITCH You told me that your father's aspiration for you is that you would become an engineer. NARCISSISTER Yeah. And he told me that if I did, he would buy me a red Porsche. Not that he had available funds around for that. It was his vision that I would become an engineer, and I would drive a red Porsche and I would wear power suits for women. He loved the idea that I would be that kind of powerful woman, which I am in my own way. I did become an engineer and successful in a way that he was proud of. And I wear power suits as Narcissister, not so much as myself. DEITCH So, you are an engineer. NARCISSISTER Yeah, a costume engineer. DEITCH Let's fast forward to your exhibition at Participant in New York [Narcissister, Studies for Participatory Sculptures, 2018]— 164
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one of the most important alternative art spaces. So, I walk into your exhibition and I have an expectation of what your work is like, but I'm stunned to be confronted by your totem. Every few years, there's an artwork that just knocks me out. Something that is totally in my aesthetic arena, but I'm absolutely unprepared for it, and it’s a shock. I remember how disconcerted I was seeing your totem. And first it's unclear, I think, are these live figures on the totem? Or what are they? So there's this confounding perception: is this real or is this all an illusion? NARCISSISTER I wanted to start making sculptures that would be in galleries because the stage props that I design for live performance are essentially sculptures, but they're considered theatrical props because they’re presented on a stage, and for a performance. They are also participatory, because when I interact with these props, they morph, they do unexpected things. And so Lia Gangitano [founder of Participant Inc. NY]—when she was looking at my collage studies for these participatory sculptures, she said, “I'd love you to manifest one for the exhibition.” And I thought, wonderful, I know how to do that. And so, I had this idea for a totem. There were totems by Niki de Saint Phalle on the UCSD campus that I remember from my childhood. And I saw a beautiful totem in the British Museum of Natural History in London. And Louise Bourgeois is one of the artists that has inspired my work the most. And obviously, she's made beautiful totems. So, this idea of a totem was in my mind. I made a version for the Participant show, and as I've done in other pieces, I incorporated additional Narcissisters. So, I wouldn't be the only one in the totem. There would be other women. I worked with a builder and rigger I've worked with for a long time—Evan Collier at Arch [Production and Design NYC]—and we designed the totem together. I had a sex doll that I found on eBay, very inexpensively, just in my collection of Narcissister things that I hadn't used yet. The piece is disconcerting, as you say, because it's hard to distinguish between the sex dolls and the Narcissisters. DEITCH So, I arranged for a residency for you last summer in Los Angeles, and we did one particularly interesting adventure we should talk about. Because I’ve been asking about your father's background. And as you said, he grew up in Watts. So, I said, “Let's go take a drive and see the house, where he grew up.” NARCISSISTER There we were in LA, everything was shut down, still full quarantine times and you suggested it as an outing since really, we couldn't do anything else except go AUTRE MAGAZINE 12 The Doppelgänger
to the grocery store. You suggested seeing the house that my father grew up in. That was wonderful for me because I had never seen it. So, we drove to Watts. I had an address from my uncle, but we couldn't find the actual house, or any house there, just a modern apartment building. To this day, it's a little bit of a question as to whether my uncle gave me the correct address. I'm assuming that we saw the area that was the space where his house was. We were also able to go visit the Watts Towers. That was wonderful for me because I hadn't been to the Watts Towers since I was a child. I remember my dad telling me that Simon Rodia, when he was building the Watts Towers, would come around to the houses in the neighborhood and knock on the door asking for any broken or cracked dishes, cups, bowls, whatever it was that people didn't want anymore, to donate to the project. So, thank you for taking me on that very special adventure. See, Jeffrey, there’s a consistent interest you have had in my work and in what has contributed to me becoming the artist I am. It's just a fact that you have showed a consistent interest in me and my work, and that's wonderful. DEITCH And, we're looking forward to the next developments. NARCISSISTER It's a wild time now, it's a fallow time, but I'm cultivating my garden over here. So, I think at some point everything will be blooming and very robust after this period of gestation.
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