The raw, beating heart of the show was Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier (2001-2002), projected large in a darkened nook and casting a figurative shadow over the entire exhibition. Cohen, a queer, Jewish South African, stumbles through a Johannesburg shantytown that is being torn down around its residents. In elaborate, bejeweled makeup, Cohen wears a large, jangling crystal chandelier as a dress: he is a spectacle of white privilege. Striking mannered poses in his precariously towering platform heels, he is as much in danger of collapse as the fragile shacks around him. A few locals are joyful and many are shocked. To some, he is an angel sent from God; to one, a whore to be fucked. Regardless, he continues his halting choreography through a ravaged landscape of poverty, disenfranchisement and despair decked out in the chi-chi symbols of a feminized, decadent elite (also flagged as Jewish through the Stars of David he wears on his body), haughtily refusing to communicate verbally. A catalyst amid chaos, Cohen is alternately threatened and protected, cursed and blessed. Cohen is not personally responsible for apartheid or the glaring economic injustice that remains in its aftermath, yet we fear that the artist's mere presence in the shantytown, wearing his ridiculous finery and frippery, further subjugates the squatters. But clearly, feelings of being mocked by this intervention do not approach the devastation they have experienced as a result of the social and economic conditions under which they live. Cohen becomes an easy target for our disapproval, but only because systemic injustice rarely clowns for its victims and makes a spectacle of itself like cosmopolitan artists do. Similarly, in another video, Andy Bichlbaum of media infiltrators "The Yes Men is castigated by a BBC newscaster for the "cruel trick" played by the organization on the people of Bhopal, getting their hopes up with the wish-fulfilling prank of devising a televised apology on behalf of Dow Chemical for the ruinous Union Carbide disaster. As if their brazen act of corporate humiliation and sabotage were more malicious than the company's far greater crime of destroying thousands of Indian lives.
Cohen's piece establishes drag as an important theme, one that offers a compelling model for identity in our current historical moment. Costumes are an important element of the show, as artists get tricked out as Miss Canadiana (Camille Turner), Lesbian Rangers (Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan), and a doctor willing to write excuse notes (Alison S.M. Kobayashi). Artists both dress up and dress down, performing figures of authority (and assuming their powers), taking on the guises of the abject, and also confusing such dichotomies. For example, Sislej Xhafa declared himself the unofficial 1997 Albanian representative at neighbouring Italy's Venice Biennale, where he roamed the grounds in the guise of a soccer player, thus embodying both prized sports hero and pavilion-deprived Balkan transient. Similarly, Alicia Framis' large gown made from the near-indestructible fabric Twaron was intended as protective armour for women, but was also emblazoned with abusive and derogatory phrases chosen by women and copyrighted to prevent their public use again. Through publicizing violent speech, the dress transposes the shame of abuse from victim to perpetrator.
Mattias Olofsson's drag is his ongoing performance as a real i9th-century Sami woman named Stor-Stina, here seen in a video learning to speak the slang Rinkeby-Swedish. As Stor-Stina, Olofsson mediates anxieties between the indigenous Sami, non-indigenous Swedes and their state, and young, suburban immigrants, whose patois Stor-Stina receives lessons in. It seems that Rinkeby-Swedish is not so much about words as about the correct physical performance of masculinity (the coach acts as if he does not notice that Olofsson's persona is a woman) and their linguistic exercises add a further layer of ethnocultural drag to Olofsson's work.
Other artists infringe on the art world, and Rightfully Yours, from the margins. Washington, DC-based Mingering Mike made covers for his own imaginary soul albums with paper, pencil and ink that reference the black community and its struggles in the late 60s and 70s. He is present here both for his self-insertion into the recording industry and as a sort of meta-commentary, the "outsider" artist as an interloper in a show otherwise populated by "professionals" His handmade albums about sickle-cell anemia, drug abuse, bad landlords, Bruce Lee and Vietnam are examples of history told from the ground up, broad issues filtered through the mind and hands of a fantasist into poignant cultural emblems.
With their status as entertainment rather than art, Sacha Baron Cohen's creations, Borat, Bruno and Ali G, are interlopers here as well, and we are invited to partake of their pleasures on YouTube on our own time. The corporate profit motive makes us immediately more suspicious of Cohen's intercultural exhibitionism than if he were a credentialed contemporary artist with an explicitly critical agenda. (Framing the show with two Cohens suggests homage to the diasporic wandering Jew as a model for all the artists' border-transgressing peregrinations.)
With a deep respect for ambiguity, uncertain emotions and the insights provided by irony, Ajji's exhibition was a preternaturally mature and satisfying effort. Just as the prominent comma in the exhibition title demands that we sign on to its project--and assert our own agency in the process--Ajji leaves for us to fill in many blanks in Rightfully Yours,.
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