Organ Player
March 15 -16, 21- 23, 2013, 8pm
ADDITIONAL SHOW ADDED! THURSDAY, MARCH 21!
466 Grand Street
New York, NY
Narcissister’s
new evening-length performance, Organ Player, stretches the limits of our
spectatorship. While her recent solo gallery exhibition, Narcissister is You,
placed us in proximity to surfaces and mirrors, Organ Player lures us into a
body, one that threatens to eject its contents. Narcissister turns the body
inside-out, reminding us that the abject is neither internal nor external,
subject nor object. Making explicit the latent correlation between abject
sociality and abject fluids, she stages an uncanny scene of reanimation,
enveloping us in the cushiony folds of bodily organs, impossibly housed in a
flat wooden doll. The doll’s mobile hinges cast an eerie humor throughout this
episodic performance abounding with Narcissister’s distinctive blend of
performance art, dance, striptease, music, feminist craft, and vaudevillian
trickery.
By
turns evoking the spectral scene of Heinrich von Kleist’s marionette theatre
and confronting what Tavia Nyong’o refers to as the “failed humor” of the
ceramic figurine’s “racist kitsch,” Organ Player aestheticizes the intertwined
relationship between race, subjectivity, and grace. As the doll’s body composes
itself, at what point does the inanimate become animate? Donning hard masks and
inserting various paraphernalia into her orifices, Narcissister has been known
to place the brittle surface of the kitsch or fetish object against—and
into—the mutable, muscular surface of her live fleshy body. In her rendering of
a larger-than-life doll, she goes on to further explore the interplay between
object and subject, eventually entering into and bursting from internal organs
made of soft, quilted materials. As such, the coalescence of affect and
materiality asks us to feel the feeling heart, succumb to the resounding organ.
-
Ariel Osterweis
Narcissister
is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing mask and merkin, she works at
the intersection of performance art, burlesque, dance, and visual art. She
actively integrates her prior experience as a professional dancer and
commercial artist with her current art practices in a range of creative media,
including collage, photography, video art, and music. In addition to being a
featured performer at The Box, she has presented work in New York at The New
Museum, The Kitchen, and at Abrons Art Center and at many nightclubs,
galleries, and alternative art spaces. Narcissister was a re-performer of
Marina Abramovic’s Luminosity piece as part of The Artist is Present
retrospective at MoMA. Narcissister has
also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb,
Croatia, at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival, at The Festival of Women
in Ljubljana, Slovania, at Warehouse 09, Copenhagen’s first live art festival,
and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have also been included in
gallery shows and film festivals worldwide. Her film The Self-Gratifier won an
award for “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at The 2008 Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival.
Interested in troubling the divide between popular entertainment and
experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister was in FORE at The Studio Museum
and had her first solo gallery exhibition "Narcissister is You" at
envoy enterprises in February 2013.
Performance is intended for mature audiences.
