Introduction: skin, surface, sensorium

Abstract

This introduction contextualizes this special issue of Women & Performance by examining surface as an object of inquiry across a variety of fields, including psychoanalysis, literary studies, sensation and affect studies, and art history. The editor of this special issue links earlier discussions of the relation between surface and depth to more recent interdisciplinary work in black diaspora studies highlighting the convergence of race, surface, and aesthetics. Through an engagement with the interplay between surface, skin, and the senses; black contemporary art in the United States; and the video work of performer Grace Jones, the editor suggests the sensuous and slippery performance work that surface play enables.

Keywords:

• surface
• depth
• fold
• skin
• sensorium
• relationality
• aesthetics
• representation
• perception
• race
• interiority

Acknowledgments

I greatly thank Managing Editor Olivia Michiko Gagnon for her unwavering commitment, expertise, and enthusiasm in the preparation of this issue and introduction, the editorial collective and anonymous readers for their nuanced and generous readings of the contributor's essays, and the whip-smart insights of the contributors who I am honored to be in conversation with here and elsewhere. Finally, muchísimas gracias to The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos for their permission to reproduce the artwork that appears in this issue.

Note on contributor

Uri McMillan is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Departments of English, African American Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published essays in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; artist interviews in ASAP/Journal and Aperture; and contributed essays to museum publications, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is the author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015), the winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, and the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American performance, both from the American Society for Theater Research (ASTR).

Notes

1 For more on embodied perception, see Marks (2000).

2 This approach dovetails with what Kobena Mercer (2016) named “cut-and-mix aesthetics,” or call and response in visual art by African American and Black British artists, as paradigmatic of post-1980s black diaspora aesthetic practice.

3 Anne Cheng (2011) concurs in her exegesis of Josephine Baker, Modernism, and the modern surface; she questions what other racial schemas become available when we move away from our longstanding assumptions about skin – namely, a Frantz Fanon-derived understanding of race (presented primarily in Black Skin, White Masks [1952]) as an “epidermal schema” (7) tethered to the visible. An attention to the “surfacism of black skin” (110), Cheng suggests, illustrates how Baker's nudity never stands alone; rather, her theatricalized nakedness often relies on its idiosyncratic intimacy with other layered, synthetic, and often feminized and racialized surfaces – banana skins, feathers, gold drapery, and animal fur (110).

4 See Amber Musser, Brown Jouissance: Inhabitations of the Pornotrope (forthcoming).

5 Surface Area: Selections from the Permanent Collection was exhibited from March 24–June 26, 2016 and organized by Doris Zhao. Quotes are taken from the exhibition wall text.

6 For more on Lopez and Ramos, see Malagamba-Ansótegui and Rivera-Servera, (2016).

7 These tastemakers and artistic peers include Andy Warhol, Issey Miyake, Helmut Newton, Kenzo Takada, Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, Azzedine Alaia, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yves Saint Laurent, Tse Kwong Chi, and her frequent collaborator Jean-Paul Goude, among others. As Jones (2015) herself notes: “I was always looking for the new, even if it makes life difficult for me. The new or nothing” (311).

8 I am reminded here of Jennifer Brody's (2008) contention that punctuation marks choreograph thought. I borrow the language of thinking blackness otherwise, and thinking gender otherwise, from Christina Sharpe and Alex Weheliye respectively.

9 I follow the lead of José Esteban Muñoz (2013) here in his distinguishing between the work of music historians, specifically their reconstruction of biographical events, versus the charge of the performance theorist – considering the performativity of icons like Jones and their role as “figures that represent a certain way of feeling and being in the world” (99).