Tracey Rose
Tits and Ass (2017)
The work Tits and Ass comprises thirteen color prints on cotton paper. They feature a background using the Brooklyn Museum logo and notepads inscribed in differing colors adorned by painterly interventions. The handwritten notes are the score for a performance that the artist spontaneously staged at the opening of the exhibition ‘Global Feminism’ on March 24, 2007, at the Brooklyn Museum. Pink and blue denote the two fictional characters, engaged in an acerbically critical discussion of the exhibition. The video of the performance for the exhibition’s opening, which also served as Tracey Rose’s commentary on it, was then integrated into the Brooklyn Museum display, together with the prints.
For the performance, Rose stood behind a lectern, presenting a conversation between a pink and a blue doll, embodied by two socks in corresponding colors. The dialogue conducted in this manner became a critical examination of the exhibition ‘Global Feminism’ together with underlying understandings of feminism as a white, Eurocentric theory aimed at educated, middle-class women. At the very beginning of the performance, the two figures declare that the artist has no intention of talking about her own work. The tone is provocative, the opinion of the exhibition – organized with the support of a wealthy American collector – is critical. Tracey Rose’s analysis of the exhibition concludes that it is an exercise in alibis, primarily reflecting a white perspective. To emphasize the discrepancy between white and Black feminists, between the experiences of white women and POC, she brashly claims that the white American artist Barbara Kruger has killed her African American colleague Adrian Piper, leading to the conclusion: ‘everyone is dead […] except the W.W.: white and wealthy.’