In starting with Arendt’s claim, her stating that ‘the performance is in the work,’ I’m setting up what follows for a quite task. After all, by making the claim that a performance is located in something is to agree to its physical presence or that the performance is somehow recorded. But doesn’t this go against the grain of performance’s ontology, that is, it disappears and doesn’t remain?

Andres Serrano’s America series premiered at Gimpel Fils Gallery, London in the fall of 2002. The work was begun the previous year, inspired by the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., 2001. [3] At the time of its premier, the series comprised only 49 photos and the artist promised that more photos were on the way. Currently, there are 100 photos and they have been published in a massive catalog along with some of Serrano’s previous work. While the whole series hasn’t been installed in a single gallery space, a selection of 16 was on display during my two visits in 2002.

From the exhibition literature, the work, or at least the installation of it, was very careful to adhere to the imported chestnut of the reductive American cultural-relation concept, the melting pot: “A place where everyone, regardless of colour or religion is able to belong and prosper. By creating such a large series, Serrano has been able to catch this diversity” and, “In perceiving these small nuances [subtlety, underplayed beauty and dignity] Andres Serrano has produced a body of work that manages to place each person within the wider American community without losing sight of the individual.” In summing up, “The series is driven by the idea that America is a community of communities…but who are united by a common bond and a continuing belief in the American dream.” [4] Hmmm, that’s quite a bit he’s managed to accomplish. But underneath the rhetorics of these gallery didactics what is the community of communities and the invisible common bonds that ties people together so tidily and un-problematically?

Turning away from the physical photographs and their formal style for a moment, while keeping them very close by, I’m interested in their public presentation in exhibition form as, what I’ve termed, a patriotic performance. While Serrano’s sitters are involved in their own personal and collective performances as occupational or sociological types, I’m concerned with Serrano’s more subtle part in spite of the troubles it causes. As a writer, I’m hesitant to embroil myself too closely with the artist’s own words. Yet, in this case, the vocabulary Serrano has used to articulate his thoughts on how the series began, as well as his position in relation to the September 11 attacks, leads me consider these photos as more than a description of his work. Instead, I hear and see a national mythology that is being re-staged. But this re-staging is different in that its performance is not temporal; it isn’t just spoken and, perhaps most importantly, it remains.

As Hannah Arendt has said in relation to events that occur in the public realm, “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.” [5] That said, I’m attempting to tie Serrano’s artistic practice to a performed identity. The scene of this performance is not a public acting or speaking, yet he nonetheless reveals an identity that is formed through a national mythology. Not to overstate the point, but again, Serrano is taking portraits of people. More subtly he is also performing. In his photographic action (click) is the expression of an abstract concept of nationhood. Serrano’s America series could be fit within a wider tradition of patriotic rituals that promotes and illustrates national mythologies of cultural diversity and coherency. “Isn’t that what America is all about? Being on equal ground?” But even further, Serrano’s photos don’t simply struggle to remind us of a collective identity. The effort is more anxious: it attempts to recover and restage a lost national community, whereby this restaging of the American community myth points to its absence rather than reminding us of its presence.

This conception of America is both unbounded and framed and, as we can see, bear-hugs “these people [who], in reality, would not only not know each other but would be completely unable to relate to one another.” [6] In spite of the range of conversations that Serrano might hope to initiate by arranging the photographs, the interplay among the photographic subjects is really only implied. The glaring contradiction here is that while Serrano, in his own words, is trying to express “that we’re all in this together,” in the next breath he acknowledges that, in fact, we aren’t in this together and probably never will be. In another configuration of community, Jean-Luc Nancy figures it something like this: “[community] is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community.” [7] This ‘identity’ of the community can be many things, but while we’re talking about Serrano’s work, the connective tissue for his communal concept, while he doesn’t state it specifically, is a mythic community called America. While Serrano’s own words will testify to his adherence to this myth of American diversity and community, I’m suspicious of whether he has taken into consideration an important operation of myths and the scene of mythology: that is, myths don’t just cohere people into communities of shared beliefs, they also create communities by enforcing and rewarding behavior.

Events, especially traumatic ones, have the same power to create communities: “I’ve never been patriotic. In any case, I think the word is open to interpretation. I have my own sense of what patriotism means. But what I felt in New York after September 11 was a sense of unity…There was a sense that we’re all in this together.” [8] Again, here is that intangible unity of “we,” “together,” “all.” Serrano cites the September 11 attacks as a connective tissue that, supposedly, bound people together and stirred patriotic feelings in him. Yet his work is not a group portrait. This is a series of very distinctly individual portraits. So we have Detective, Chinese Cook, and Boy Scout. In spite of what Serrano intended to project, his work is still reductive. “We interpret the world by dividing up our perceptions into categories: people may be policemen, say, or soldiers, or firemen. We assign an object or a person to an appropriate category as a result of judgments we make about which category the principle features of the person or object resemble.” [9] The longer I spend with these photos the more difficult it becomes to break free of them. By that I mean Serrano’s work is an idée fixe, held tightly in place and opposed to fluidity. He uses a rigidly standardized composition that holds subjectivities and personalities tightly in place, they’re anesthetized. And in this rigidity, they are forced to speak and stand for Serrano’s America. I’m finding it very difficult to make room for anything else.

National myths and symbols are transmitters of, and also for, political and theological meaning. But their form of storytelling is not always didactic. Symbols rely on seemingly contradictory properties of ambiguity and compression, permitting subjective readings but also strictly enforcing rituals. As David Kertzer explains: “Condensation refers to the way in which individual symbols represent and unify a rich diversity of meanings…these various ideas are not just simultaneously elicited but also interact with one another so that they become associated together in the individual’s mind.” Ambiguity, on the other hand, “means that symbols are not arcane ways of saying something that could be more precisely expressed in simple declarative form. The complexity and uncertainty of meaning of symbols are sources of their strength.” [10] While this dual nature would at first appear incommensurate, they are, in fact, commingled but are so at different registers. [...]

Patriotism, as a vigorous and uncritical devotion to a nation-state, generalizes in order to bind a population with common virtues and ideals. Serrano’s conception of America, what the work is in response to and the foundation upon which it is built, blankets over discourse. This myth of the melting pot and social diversity passes through, and asserts itself against, the opposing narrative that confronted America on September 11. But here, importantly, it does so not through counter-discourse or dialogue, it does so only by trumpeting a regained national identity that continues to ignore otherness. I use the prefix ‘re-‘ to point to the repetition that patriotism, and mythology in general, relies upon, especially in its rituals. Serrano’s repeated performance, which I am locating in the consistently formatted photos as they are arranged in exhibition and published form, attempts to regain a lost community that supposedly existed previous to the attacks, “…always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and intangible bonds in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy.” [11] It is a country of everyone yet is selective in the ways that it overlooks how many of the communities within have struggled for visibility. It overlooks struggle and avoids confronting conflict by taking refuge in the American myth. Quite simply, it overlooks.

America, and other national performances like the singing of the Start Spangled Banner and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, are, amongst other things, records of and responses to historical events. As a celebration to the endurance of the American flag standing after the Battle of Fort Mc Henry, the event on which the National Anthem is based, so to do the collected personalities captured in Serrano’s photos stand up and carry on after the events of September 11. In all the colors of American culture, Serrano asserts their continued presence and immortalizes them as everlasting cultural facets. But keeping the September 11 attacks in mind, how has Serrano chosen to engage in recent American history or foreign policy? In other words, has he confronted why the attacks happened in the first place? Does this work ask any questions? I don’t think so, no. Instead, following along the methodology of patriotism and patriotic performances in general, his language glosses over the specificities of the problem. These photographs don’t look outward or extend themselves beyond the confines of the nation in a way that engages in discourse. If they do engage anything, and I think that a few of them do, it is unapologetically, undiplomatically, and defiantly.

This effacement, turning his back on the outside and the international community doesn’t encourage a reply or response. Serrano’s performance/exhibit is a one-sided statement that is thrown into the face of audiences and the world as evidence of an American recovery. Besides the unity, in a few of the photos there is also a sense of calm and even disregard, as if the country is able to simply absorb and envelope the attack. It does so by rekindling a hyperbolized myth of national pride, diversity, and idealism performed through a photographic exhibition. Amongst other things, it also overlooks confrontation, blockages, and cultural incommensurates.

While there is an argument that the act of repetition reinforces meaning…in being repeated over and over, orthodoxy becomes condensed and ossified, others have argued that repetition does the opposite. That repetition is not a repeating of the same but through repetition, difference is created. But within community building rituals, “The specific content as well as the general meaning of action and speech may take various forms of reification in art works…and, by transformation and condensation, show some extraordinary event in its full significance. However, the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and ‘reified’ only through a kind of repetition.” [13] What Arendt is getting at is the need or necessity for repetition in order to impart and ossify meaning amidst shifting social contexts. Contained as it is in the flows of culture and the public realm, the art object can only impart it’s meaning by being repeated over and over again.

As a counter argument to Arendt, Judith Butler’s identity theory posits repetition as a subversive force that can break free of performatives…what we think of as cultural habits. Her question is laid out like this, “…if the ‘I’ is a site of repetition, that is if ‘I’ only achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it. In other words, does or can the ‘I’ ever repeat itself, cite itself faithfully, or is there a displacement from its former moment that establishes the permanently non-self-identical status of that ‘I’?” [14] I don’t think so, no. In performing a repetition to stabilize identity, repetition becomes only a shaky ground that finds itself unable to reproduce itself faithfully, or what others have termed as ‘passing’: passing for white, passing for gay, as an American, or a fireman. As an identity is repeated over and over, it becomes impossible to measure it against a faithful or original rendition.

So if we drop Serrano’s work into this discussion about identity formation, meaning, and repetition, I think we can see how, intentionally or not, the work echoes some of the points made by both Arendt and Butler. But my reading of America, both the photographs and the artist’s own words, is as a series that futilely employs repetition to enforce and condense meaning but, as I’ve tried to show through my interruption of patriotism, that this repetition only reinforces the absences that mythology seeks to fill. Or in this case, the America Serrano is looking for but has never existed.