Something to See Here: Staged Violence in Contemporary Art

This dissertation focuses on artists working in the United States who, during the 1970s and beyond, stage violence against women, Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Black/African American people—marginalized identities with which the artists themselves identify. In so doing, they call attention to the prevalence of disproportionate violence committed against women and people of color in the United States at a broader societal level. I examine how women, Black/African American, Afro-Latinx, and Latinx artists perform or stage scenes of violence as a means of making visible, palpable, and inescapable the effects of the real victimization their communities disproportionately face. Through surprise encounter, reality effects, and viewer participation, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Shaun Leonardo convey the feeling of looming violence to viewers who, by perception or statistics, feel themselves to be safely outside of threats of identity-based violence. These artists take up and re-deploy violence, often in live or embodied artworks, to counter stereotypes about their communities, challenge their own historical exclusion from mainstream art networks, and open up affective space for viewers themselves to confront the disparities of violence in the US. Throughout, I put forth a theory of Permanent-Potential-Victimhood, a traumatic identity unique to marginalized communities in the United States. I characterize this condition as a kind of future trauma, the pervasive feeling that you are never far from being victimized on the basis of your visual presentation of racial, ethnic, and/or gendered identity—actual or presumed, and over which you have no control. By implicating viewers as witnesses, perpetrators, and/or as victims in scenes of violence against bodies of color, these artworks activate feelings of being equally close to the type of brutality in question, as a means to impact upon the viewer-participant’s feelings about actual violence