Borrowed Speech: Giving an Account of Another with Wu Tsang's Full Body Quotation

Borrowed Speech:Giving an Account of Another with Wu Tsang's Full Body Quotation Summer Kim Lee (bio) When multidisciplinary artist WU TSANG was an MFA student at the University of California, Los Angeles, she conducted archival research on JENNIE LIVINGSTON'S well-known 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning, which followed the queer, trans, Black, and Latinx drag ball scene in Harlem during the late 1980s. TSANG visited UCLA's Film & Television Archive, where she viewed unedited footage cut from the film that contained LIVINGSTON'S interviews with drag ball participants. While the final cut of the documentary does not include LIVINGSTON'S visible presence or audible questioning, the unedited footage includes LIVINGSTON'S prompts and interactions with the interviewees, who in turn respond at times playfully and at other times guardedly, clarifying what they mean or trying to clarify what LIVINGSTON means. This footage, housed in the archives, reveals LIVINGSTON'S own role as the filmmaker and a white lesbian woman outside of the drag ball scene she documents, as well as her investments, intentions, and relationships to those interviewed. Moreover, the footage sheds light on how LIVINGSTON'S interviewees navigated her questions in order to give an account of themselves through, and also in spite of, the documentary film's genre and narrative conventions. [End Page 679] In Tsang's video artwork, For how we perceived a life (Take 3) (2012), excerpts of dialogue from Livingston's footage she encountered in the archive, along with dialogue included in the final cut of the film, are enacted by herself and four other performers through a performance practice she calls, "full body quotation." In full body quotation, Tsang samples, inhabits, embodies, and re-cites the speech of others, of friends, acquaintances, collaborators, and subjects she encounters in the archive. Full body quotation makes evident Tsang's mastery, discipline, and training as an artist familiar with the breath and bodywork of both operatic vocal performance and lip-synching in drag performance. Yet I also understand full body quotation as a practice akin to the citational practices developed by a student working on their studies. Indeed, Tsang's gathering and curation of unedited archival materials is enabled and precipitated by her status as a student with access to the university's archives. However, while the scene of Tsang's encounter with the archive is institutionally bound, Tsang's studies as a student carry outward, like the voices of those she quotes, like the lifted sample, creating another role for the student by way of aesthetic practice. While the student might be enabled by entrance to the classroom or the archive, they are not relegated to the role either institutional site has assigned. In other words, the student can learn to approach their studies in a different way: through the role of the artist. The university's logics would compel Tsang to speak as the student in class or in the archives, as a representative of the university's socialization and education of students into responsible, dutiful, productive subjects. Faced with this expectation that so often makes students feel indebted to the university—in addition to literally accruing financial debt—Tsang grounds her work in scenes of study that beget other kinds of indebted relations, which make up the social worlds she holds close. These relations, such as those with Tsang and her fellow performers in For how we perceived a life and the interviewees of Paris Is Burning, deexceptionalize the idea of the student as an autonomous, rational, disinterested scholar in the making—an idea that works to affirm and protect the university's relevance and validates its regulatory role in civic life.1 At the same time, such relations also, as Kadji Amin might put it, "deidealize" the student as a figure who, since the social movements of the 1960s, is often made to represent both the past and future promise of radical politics' relation to the university.2 To be wary of this idealization is not to discount the historical significance of student-led social movements, nor is it to demean or belittle the [End Page 680] student as a politicized subject. It is, however, to be critical of...