The Brooklyn Rail

The mise en scène for Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity was a grand assemblage of ropes, pallets, ladders, fabric sheets, paint buckets, oil drums, and exercise equipment. Everything connected to something else. Linkages implying actions and reactions. The multi-story proscenium of NYU Skirball’s eight-hundred-seat theater fully rigged (both in height and depth) with a precarious construction ready to be tipped into motion. DIY materials but not on a DIY scale. In one corner of the stage, a miniature wooden house—a doll house of sorts. As the performance began, three performers emerged (impossibly, improbably) one-by-one from the extremely small house, revealing it to be some sort of a trap door portal to a backstage beyond, each performer wearing a Victorian doll costume (frilly pastel dress, curly wig with bouncing pigtails tied by two large bows) and a mask (one Black, one white, and one brown).

Narcissister is a masked and pseudonymous artist known for making erotically charged and humorous spectacles that articulate entrenched racial and sexual politics, or in the words of scholar Tiffany E. Barber, “anti-redemptive enactments” of racialized commodification and sexual objectification. For instance, in her earlier works, such as Every Woman (2009), Narcissister performed a reverse strip routine to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” starting out in nothing but a mask and a merkin before pulling articles of clothing from inside her body and dancing as she put them on. In Upside Down (2011), she performed an uncanny comedic dance as a life-sized, two-headed recreation of an antebellum “topsy-turvy doll” for a national television audience on America’s Got Talent, appearing with a mask on either side of her head and another two-faced prosthetic head attached to her groin. As her stint on AGT makes clear, Narcissister’s work typically moves through a variety of art contexts and economies, crossing wires between highbrow and lowbrow, art and entertainment, aesthetic contemplation and spectacular enjoyment. In addition to performing and exhibiting in theaters, galleries, and museums, she also performs regularly at high-end neo-burlesque clubs such as The Box and underground queer parties such as Zero Chill. Narcissister’s performances in each of these contexts seem to imply the economy and situation of the other contexts: her club appearances implying an edge of aesthetic contemplation, her theater performances implying the spectacular consumption of the club.

Voyage Into Infinity continues and extends many of these concerns. A large-scale spectacle involving two additional Narcissister performers (played by Effie Bowen and Dorchel Haqq), pyrotechnics by Alex Podger, and live sound composed and performed by Holland Andrews, the piece was originally commissioned by Pioneer Works, premiering in their large concrete and brick warehouse space in Brooklyn in 2024, before getting remounted at NYU Skirball for the 2026 Under the Radar Festival. As the performance started, I found myself wondering what era we were in. The three Narcissisters emerged from the onstage dollhouse in their Victorian costumes holding a five-stem silver candelabra with the candles lit, making their way around the onstage apparatus bit by bit—ducking under ropes, ladders, and a scavenged plastic playground slide—illuminating parts of the giant structure as if to show it to us with the glow of their candles. The low-tech machine seemed to be about an idea of technology without including anything we currently think of as technological (i.e. automation, electricity, motors, engines, the computational, the digital, etc.), pointing toward either the pre-industrial or post-civilizational. Although this sense of time became more complex with the presence of the musician Holland Andrews, who—visible on the side of the stage opposite the dollhouse, behind a table of electronic instruments and effects pedals—created sonic atmospheres for the piece that were lush with refractive feedback and looping vocal gestures, implying a kind of present-future. When are/were we? Where and when have these performers come from? Voyage Into Infinity was a time machine that was out of joint.

The piece was dense with references—a copy of Myron’s Discobolus on stage, sequences where Narcissister swung from swings reminiscent of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing—but the most explicit citations were two works from the late-1980s that served as the performance’s discursive framing devices: the title of the piece lifted from the 1989 song “Voyage Into Infinity” by the Black hardcore band Bad Brains, and the performance described in promotional material as “a feminist response” to the 1987 video by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go. Both of these works, in very different ways (one in a legacy of punk and noise music, the other in conceptual video art; one Black, one white), index a masculinist aesthetic of formal destruction. This is not to say that destruction is itself a masculine gesture—take for instance the luminous line of feminist punk and performance artists who blow up inherited forms and tear things apart (i.e. Poly Styrene, Ana Mendieta, etc.)—but that these two works are particularly masculinist instances of fucking shit up in the name of art and that their masculine overtones seem central to why Narcissister included them as references for her performance.

In The Way Things Go, Fischli and Weiss film an intricate series of chain reactions involving tires, boards, strings, balls, trash bags, ice, water, and fire. Somewhere between a post-Minimalist kinetic sculpture, a DIY physics experiment, and a low-impact improvised explosive device, the film documents a work that is its own destruction. Throughout, all that is visible is a world of objects changing each other, as if solely by the invisible hands of abstract forces. One of the ways that Narcissister’s performance might be characterized as a feminist take on The Way Things Go is that the labor that constructed it, and the hands that make its actions and reactions possible, were rendered extremely visible throughout the work. The very first cause-and-effect sequence began when a performer held a candelabra up to a weight-bearing rope, the small flame slowly burning its way through it and severing it, launching a series of objects into each other. In addition, things were not just destroyed in Narcissister’s work, but were also put back together—destruction art mixed with maintenance art—perhaps signaling how the everyday feminized labor of maintenance creates the conditions of possibility for more spectacular acts of destruction. Voyage Into Infinity did not end with what would have been the piece’s climactic sequence: a curtain at the back of the stage collapsed to reveal a surprise hardcore band helmed by Andrews performing the titular Bad Brains song, while a performer inserted a pyrotechnic sparkler into her vagina as she spun on a platform and a series of spinning pyrotechnic objects fell from the theater rafters. This spectacular series of events happened, and then things were partially reassembled. The performers cleaned up the stage as if they were getting ready for another show.

In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form, the literary theorist Sianne Ngai argues that the commonplace aesthetic judgement of referring to a something as a “gimmick,” or to a performance as “gimmicky,” is usually a moment when crises in the relationship between performance, objects, time, and value are being unconsciously perceived. A gimmick is a disappointing trick, a silly gadget, a fraudulent device, an overrated product. It is a technology that is too old or too new, an overperforming or underperforming situation. Gimmicks are something people on the margins often turn to in order to try to get by (harebrained inventors, con artists, performers), but they also tend to be falsely promising and frustratingly funny. Interestingly, two of the primary cultural works that Ngai turns to in order to develop a sense of the gimmick in the book’s early chapters are pertinent to Narcissister’s work. First, the song from the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy, “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” in which an ensemble of experienced burlesque dancers give labor advice to a new performer (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim: “You can pull all the stops out / Till they call the cops out / Grind your behind till you’re banned / But you gotta get a gimmick / If you wanna get ahead”); second, the cartoons of Rube Goldberg that depicted his so-called “Rube Goldberg Machines,” impossibly elaborate imagined low-tech assemblages that provide overly complicated fixes for simple tasks that don’t need fixing (As I sat down in my seat for Voyage to Infinity at NYU Skirball, I heard someone ahead of me look up at the assemblage on stage and say, “Now that is a Rube Goldberg Machine!”). Ngai argues that calling something a gimmick points to an inchoate perception of a structural crisis around labor and value, and with Ngai in mind, I want to make a rather large claim. Narcissister’s experimentation with gimmicks in Voyage Into Infinity and elsewhere (tricky objects and flashy displays) point us toward some of the big crises of our time concerning labor, gender, race, agency, desire, and value: How do we make a living amid obsolescence? Who must sell themselves to whom, and at what cost? Why can’t we get off our phones, even when we know they are little death boxes? How do we stop the war machine? How do we become a cause for an effect we truly want? How do we want other wants?

My favorite moments of the piece were in the strange stillness that would fall upon the theater in the direct aftermath of a spectacular action. The large tricks took place in quick bursts—almost like fireworks—so much of the show was spent either in the anticipation of the set-up, or in the memory of an event that had just happened. I loved these afterwords: watching a pyrotechnic element slowly fizzle out, or a piece of fabric settling lightly onto the floor after a big to-do. In one of the final moments of the piece, a series of red flares began to burn bright, and the performers just stood there, watching the flames illuminate the theater. As the flares burned, I looked around at my fellow audience members, their faces glowed a deep red.