America, the Beautiful
I remember a sign–“XXX, all nude girls, all the time!”–that flashed continuously near one of my cheaper apartments; figuratively, that same glowing sign remains the lurid subtext for avant-garde experiments with the nude female body. Naked performance is an awkward footnote in American culture. It doesn’t seem to matter which political or visual tricks artists use to reframe their nudity–a hypersexualized energy always surrounds such events. The best artists are able to subvert voyeuristic audience expectations, but nudity is still a risky performance strategy.
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Featured in the Mexican Fine Arts Center’s Sor Juana Festival, Nao Bustamante subverted naked revelations in an unusual way. Creating a pitiful, powerful clown persona whose patriotism mocks American racism, she offered a snide circus-act parody of white culture’s pinup-girl standards of beauty. Compared to the once shocking Karen Finley and the irreverent exhibitionist Annie Sprinkle, the San Francisco-based Bustamante seems tame at first, her performance straightforwardly clownish. But she merely challenges the audience in a different, less straightforward way, with the gradual realization that her disdain for traditional standards of beauty is matched by disdain for our pleasure in her performance. Her casual contempt effectively dismantles our voyeurism even as we experience it.
As our perceptions shift, she moves mechanically through her poses, occasionally stopping to adjust the record player. We hear “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” “Maybellene,” and “The Blue Danube” as she squeezes and twists herself into increasingly uncomfortable positions. She also grows more disgusted by our responses: whatever we do–clap, laugh, sit back and watch–it doesn’t seem to be right. Finally, just when we think we’re playing the game correctly by applauding her sweet little bows, she throws a tantrum, destroying her gift of roses and stomping offstage.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Monica Naranjo.
