It's somehow fitting that Lili Reynaud-Dewar's artist talk and screening of Jean Genet's explicit 1950 film, Un Chant d'Amour, was postponed last week due to the public service workers' strike that caused Tramway to be closed.
It's fitting too that another film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75 (containing hitherto unseen footage of the radical Black Panthers movement's leading lights) is on limited release in Scottish cinemas the same week Reynaud-Dewar's new performance piece, entitled Jean Genet's Walls, Speaking Of Revolt, Media And Beauty, does appear at the venue for one night only.
The political thinking behind this work is, after all, a vital signifier of both its content and influences. This has been the case with much of Reynaud-Dewar's work since the Paris-based former lawyer and dancer graduated from Glasgow School of Art.
"I find Genet's political commitments admirable," Reynaud-Dewar says of the self-styled literary outlaw and author of plays including The Maids and The Blacks, "but not devoid of certain ambiguities and misunderstandings. I think these are what make a political commitment a 'personal' quest for understanding oneself in the world, and not just obeying a certain set of rigid commandments. I also find it interesting that Genet transgresses the boundary of 'community' by committing to the causes of the Black Panthers, Palestine and North African immigrants [in a recently de-colonised France], articulating a common discourse and a thread between those different 'issues'."
In performance, the result of Reynaud-Dewar's line of inquiry will animate a group of sculptures seen earlier this year at Northampton Contemporary and built as an "anti-monument" to Genet's political writings and aesthetics via recordings of some of his crucial texts. With assorted Genet-related objects placed around the performance space, a video of Reynaud-Dewar interviewing poet and radical commentator Pierre Giquel will be translated in performance by long-term collaborator, burlesque dancer Mary Knox, described by Reynaud-Dewar as an "iconic figure of Glasgow's night scene".
"Genet used his 'marginality' as thief, prisoner or orphan to create a sort of complex common thread between different political causes," Reynaud-Dewar explains. "I use those figures to articulate an understanding of my own identity as a woman, as an artist, etc. For me it is a way to unfix my own life, and references to homosexuality, black politics and feminism have served my understanding of my position in the world."
Running alongside the Tramway events is Some Objects Blackened And A Body Too, a series of new video works at Mary Mary, the independent gallery which represents the artist. In these works, a blacked-up Reynaud-Dewar looks to the choreography of Josephine Baker and her relationship with Le Corbusier, who is himself said to have blacked-up and sported Baker-like feathers in order to seduce her.
With previous works drawing on such black totems as Rastafarianism and jazz composer Sun Ra (who purported to hail from Saturn), Reynaud-Dewar clearly isn't afraid of tackling a racially sensitive taboo already explored in part, incidentally, by live artist Linder's 13-hour performance, The Darktown Cakewalk, at Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art in 2010. Reynaud-Dewar's 2009 Mary Mary show, The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality Of The European Shorthand Typists, also featured blacked-up performers.
"The colours of the piece in Tramway are directly inspired by a quote by Genet referring to his collaboration with the Black Panthers," Reynaud-Dewar says, referring to a 1975 interview in which Genet nailed his colours to the mast by asking 'Am I a Black whose colour is white or pink, but a Black?' "By describing the skin colour in such an abrupt and direct way, Genet transgresses the notion of race and articulates the political meaning of it, and even the question of class that circulates around these questions.
"I use blacking up (onto objects, onto performers) as a way to subvert the rigidity of identity and to question the 'neutrality' of whiteness, as I would question the 'neutrality' of the masculine if I cross-dressed as a man, maybe. In the case of the Mary Mary videos, they are black and white, so it is not really certain my body is blackened. It could be blue or purple."
Jean Genet's Walls, Speaking Of Revolt, Media And Beauty is at Tramway, Glasgow, on Saturday, followed by a talk between Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Genet biographer Hadrien Laroche, www.tramway.org. Some Objects Blackened And A Body Too is at Mary Mary, Glasgow, until January 14, www.marymarygallery.co.uk
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