![]() ![]() This subjective mutability is the result of widespread recognition that identities are performative. In the postmodern era, binaristic conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality have become more fluid. These artists’ alter egos compel us to recognize ourselves as similarly fragmented and mimetic subjects. Thus, viewers, like clinicians, are hystericized in the process of attempting to convert performative displays of discordant and ahistorical symptoms into coherent narratives and stable identities. By implication, they ask audiences to diagnose or fix their protean symptoms and identities. As with hysterics, Walker, Barney, and Sherman pose themselves to viewers as a question. This void manifests as dissociative split selves produced by way of hysterical identifications in which the self is (con)fused with an other. Identity, like the ostensibly obsolete malady, is a performance of subjective lack projected upon the surface of the body. Though hysteria is widely perceived to be an antiquated relic of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle, I argue that the mimetic condition epitomizes postmodern subjective shifts. ![]() These two developments have resulted in a cultural shift characterized by the notion that subjectivity is a performance of the self as a series of simulacral images devoid of any original referent. This mainstreaming of hysteria arose in the wake of the demystification of the modernist notion of the sovereign subject as well as the supplantation of reality with simulacral images. I posit that their creation of diegetic alter egos demonstrates how the subjective splitting once attributed to hysteria has become a postmodern norm. "Portrait of the Postmodern Artist as Hysteric" explores the art of crossover celebrity artists Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Kara Walker. ![]()
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