AUSTIN, Texas — The British playwright Howard Barker once wrote, “Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.”
Such is the tantalizing lure of Narcissister, an erotic mixed-media performance artist and subject of the compelling new documentary Narcissister Organ Player, playing at this year’s SXSW. The film, directed by the mononymous masked curiosity, deconstructs her acclaimed performance-art piece “Organ Player” through the prism of her mother’s illness and death.
It opens on Narcissister—nude, save a black garter belt, stockings and heels. Splotches of white paint mark her body; red pigtails and a signature Barbie doll mask obscure her face. As she fights her way through the birth canal, a chorus of angelic voices crescendos to the heavens. Then, she exits the vast vagina and plops onto the stage.
ADVERTISEMENT
The action of Narcissister Organ Player shifts inside a posh L.A. apartment, with the enigmatic artist recreating a woman’s life journey—presenting first as a small child before shedding outfits like a matryoshka doll to capture teendom, marriage, and pregnancy. For the final transformation she is completely nude, and proceeds to remove grey braids and a wrinkled mask from her merkin-covered vagina—pulling objects out of bodily orifices is a common theme in her work—placing them on her person.
Et voila, meet Mama Narcissister.
We soon learn—via a medley of home-movie interviews with her late mother and family photos, with Narcissister placing her thumb over her face—that her mom was a Sephardic Jew from Morocco, and her father was an African-American from Watts, Los Angeles. The two met during their graduate school studies at Columbia University—he in physics, she in teaching—and fell in love, two outsiders craving the comfort of companionship.
As a mixed-race child growing up in blonde-haired, blue-eyed Southern California, Narcissister was persona non grata. Children would call her “nigger” at the playground, and her mother struggled to tame her curls. She often fantasized about being a middle-aged white woman in a nude tuxedo dress and pearls named “Kathy Winters” whose schedule was packed with appointments.
“I didn’t have their hair or their blue eyes. I didn’t have their mothers with the little tennis skirts and blonde ponytails and visors who would pick them up in convertibles from school. But I had this gorgeous body,” she recalls, adding, “So I tried to figure out a way where I could get love or get the cool surfer boys, and that was by being promiscuous.”
Her artistic persona is the embodiment of that outsiderism. She vividly remembers flipping through a dictionary as a youngster and the word “narcissist” jumped out at her.
“I wanted to pick a name that in some way pointed to the fact that I’m a person of color, a woman of color, a sister,” she explains. “It contained this idea of sister—or sisterhood—concerned beyond self. But I think it also was this idea of actually ironically looking at myself more deeply as a character with a mask than I could without it.”
Narcissister’s mother was her biggest supporter, and referred to her daughter as an artistic “genius.” She’d even participate in her erotic performances, sitting onstage in the corner and knitting while her daughter writhed about naked onstage. After, she’d offer cute critiques of the work in French like, “Your poor little vagina!” Her father, on the other hand, was more left brain, remaining “hypercritical” and uncomplimentary of her creative pursuits.
But Narcissister’s mother soon fell ill, as a childhood case of rheumatic fever gave way to open-heart surgery to repair her valves. The operation left her with a visible scar across her chest, and in a fragile state of health for the remainder of her life. She soon became emotionally dependent on Narcissister, who at a young age assumed the role of reluctant caretaker.
“The fact that she needed me so much was oppressive. It was a lot of responsibility,” she confesses. “I really invested myself in this idea that my mother really needed me, and that I was essential to her survival and to her well-being. I think there’s a lot of truths and lies in all of that.”
“Even the mask had so much to do with my mom,” she adds. “I became powerful and successful as another woman—another face, another name—and so I did not threaten our dynamics, or threaten her.”
Watching the film, one gets the impression that the Narcissister character is very much shaped by her early-life experiences—the “self-hatred” she developed as a mixed-race outsider, her father’s suffocating control over her mother, her mother’s carved-up body. The much-ballyhooed America’s Got Talent appearance and her paparazzi-friendly dates with Marilyn Manson belie a woman struggling to navigate the depths of her despair.
“One way of looking at that is my mother’s body was so present throughout my childhood and throughout my life because of her various illnesses, and what I’m doing with my work is saying to myself, ‘I have no limitations. I can put things in my vagina, I can traverse taboos, I have no limits—to my physical body, to my identity, to my womanhood—that I will accept,” she says.
Which brings us to “Organ Player.” An immense effigy of her mother graces the stage. Narcissister climbs up its right pigtail—stark naked, of course—and enters its mouth. This, one assumes, is an R-rated homage to both her mother’s erotic relationship with food and the notion that our ancestors live on in us. She’s next digested and shat out in a brown, turd-like bag, emerging from it—stark naked, of course—once more.
At another point in the performance, Narcissister’s body is encased in a heart, her black stockings and heels visible underneath. The organ is connected to the effigy by a series of blood vessels. As the heart gives, the beeps of the heart rate monitor grind to a halt, she tears the vessels off and collapses onstage. Her mother is dead.
The effect of “Organ Player”—and the documentary—is emotional transference. We feel the ecstasy and anguish of Narcissister as she dives headfirst into her reservoir of pain. And what a thrilling, profound experience it is.
Trust me: you’ve never seen anything like it.
