Cleaving

Even now, Fassbinder seems like too much, still way ahead of us, so out there. Using Whity as a starting point in its unveiling of the master/slave dialectic and power relations in the form of a movie musical or popular vernacular, this video installation’s collusion of race, gender and sexuality as baroque presentation or masquerade and distortion, acts as a rejoinder to that outrageous German film. Flower Drum Song – another ur-text but this one for Asian Americans – reanimates these issues in a contemporary, equally bewitching context placed in the “cold
room” of the Tornitz church.

Three-channels: lifesize video projection of dancer Laurie Young with two mini-LCD monitors featuring Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay singing to Nancy Kwan singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl (Jew, Fag...)”.