The last time I saw Narcissister perform, she was dressed like a peasant girl—braided hair tucked beneath a humble bonnet, a baby doll in her arms—and squatting over a bucket with naked legs spread wide, in order to keep her billowy, floral dress out of the line of fire, so to speak. It was the summer of 2023 at S.O.B.’s in Greenwich Village. I was knocking back stiff drinks at a benefit party for the trailblazing downtown art space Participant Inc, which was celebrating 20 years of championing New York’s most avant garde avant-garde. Narcissister was wearing her trademark Barbie-like mannequin mask, exuding all the creepy vibes of a beauty queen cyborg about to go off the deep end. She rubbed her belly, as if suffering from an impending bout of diarrhea. Her thighs briefly quivered. And then she shot a perfectly white egg out of her merkin-covered vagina, which landed in the pail with a thud.

Egg (2022), as the piece is called, portrays an overworked mother caring for her child and tending house. The performance begins with her dusting the walls while stepping around toys scattered everywhere, then mopping the floor with one hand as the other holds her babe close to her breast—all the duties of any good, stay-at-home mom. An upbeat, big band jazzy number plays in the background. A man and a woman, singing about domestic bliss, cast everything in impossibly contrived, mid-century gender dynamics: the personal Hell of Narcissister’s flustered heroine, for whom everything falls apart when she discovers she’s out of eggs, with nothing to feed her offspring. The jazz record screeches to a halt. A techno track composed entirely of rooster crow and hen cluck staccatos marks a manic pivot to the egg-laying chaos that follows. After expelling the first one that night at S.O.B.’s, she backed up, rubbed her tummy some more, and rushed back to the bucket, as if another egg might force its way out at any moment. She squatted and it did. The audience gasped. Then another popped out. And then another. And another. She brought her hand to her forehead as if dizzy. How many eggs can a vaginal canal hold? Quite a lot, it turns out.

As the piece neared its end, I was buzzed and Narcissister had deposited a dozen or so unbroken eggs into her bucket, which she chirpily brought to a table on stage, cracking one open into a frying pan. Egg ends with her plating the cooked food and shoving it in front of the nearest audience member. The brave viewer is then forced to eat it while everyone else watches, squealing and horrified. At least, that’s how the audience reacts when she performs the piece at The Box—a downtown performance space specializing in late-night burlesque and erotica were she’s had a consistent gig for years; while the audience there is often unfamiliar with Narcissister’s explicit physical feats, her performance at S.O.B.’s for the outré patrons of Participant Inc was a typical entree at the weirdo family reunion, eagerly devoured as soon as it arrived.

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Narcissister is an expert at shock value, but you’d be remiss to think that her shock isn’t strategic. For nearly two decades she’s put her body on the line to caricature traditional gender and racial roles that persist within culture-at-large, and more specifically in the niche fields of art history and burlesque. Recent rollbacks of basic human rights have made Narcissister’s outrageous send-ups of domesticity, motherhood, the media, and other markers of outmoded values all the more relevant. Narcissister makes her body monstrous to hilarious and unsettling effect, the unruly subject of our darkest fears and desires. That she can tailor her act to cramped, dingy spaces and then pivot to big-time museums—or attract a snobby downtown scene of performance art-insiders as well as the coast-spanning masses tuning in to America’s Got Talent—speaks not only to the unique flexibility of her appeal and expertise, but to her resonance at a time when human dignity and self-expression are both so endangered.

Narcissister was preparing for her largest spectacle yet, Voyage Into Infinity, when I met up with her this past July at Pioneer Works, where the commission was set to open in September. She was having to work around the messy squalor of months of construction, as the organization upgraded its 19th century waterside warehouse building. “Hi, Isabelle,” I said when I saw her, referring to her by her civilian name. Slim and petite and surrounded by dust and giant sheets of plastic, she was dressed casually in form-fitting athletic wear, with chunky glasses perched on her nose, her copious curls loosely tied up. Eyeing the fruits of my beachside labors, she commented on my tan. I had forgotten how friendly and charming she is, which can be disarming coming from someone whose stage presence is so unsettling. “Sorry, it’s a little crazy in here,” she continued, “but we’re cutting wood for the machine.”

Narcissister was referring to the centerpiece of Voyage Into Infinity: a Rube Goldberg machine in which one object moves and tips off another, setting off a chain reaction, like an elaborate, ad hoc system of falling dominoes. It was inspired by the version artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss made for their video The Way Things Go (1987), except hers was going to be feminized, and sized to Pioneer Works’s cavernous Main Hall, which is 34 feet high and more than 100 feet long—a scale on which Narcissister had never before worked. She’d workshopped a much smaller version months before, at a nearby space called Kaje. There, she made a seesaw with a bucket on one end, which she filled with water. As it got heavier, it sank to the ground, tipping off a rope on the other end of the plank that unhooked a series of rolled-up tapestries along a back wall, which unspooled in dramatic succession, ending with the release of a small potted tree. Narcissister began decorating the shrub with ornaments, Christmas-style. When she was out of baubles, she lifted her dress, and for several long minutes she proceeded to pull a garland out of her as she dressed the tree with this final bit of holiday cheer, sourced straight from her infinite insides.

How this would all change at Pioneer Works remained to be seen. Looking around at all the junk piled everywhere, it wasn’t easy to determine what was construction clutter and what was future Narcissister sculpture. The umbrella in the corner covered in reams of printer paper was probably the former. The creepy naked mannequin whose hips and feet were screwed onto a seesaw contraption was most definitely the latter. “I have about 90% of it figured out,” she told me, my hard hat hanging heavy over my right eye. At some point in the piece’s run time, a large, round disc will roll down an incline towards the audience, tripping a bowling ball that’ll topple a row of wooden pallets. Pioneer Works’s head installer, Julian Townley, noted that at its current height, the disc would only rotate twice instead of really coming at you—underwhelming. “Can you make it higher?”, she asked him. The combination of barreling objects and the rumored use of pyrotechnics in a largely wooden structure made me think Voyage Into Infinity would be the most exciting Narcissister performance yet—or possibly Pioneer Works’s last.

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Narcissister didn’t come out of the womb laying eggs. Rather, her path to vaginal infamy was long and winding. She was born in New York City and raised in the upscale San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, by a University of California professor, Oscar James Lumpkin Jr., an African American physicist from Watts, and Sarah Benzaquen, a Moroccan Jewish immigrant from Tangier who taught French and Spanish extension classes, also at UCSD. Growing up, Narcissister’s artistic sensibilities were highly influenced by her mother, a free spirited hippie type who extolled the creative potential of boredom and the pleasures of finding beauty in strange things. Sarah encouraged Narcissister to craft and sew, and enlisted her help in the kitchen, where she prepared elaborate meals from scratch. She absorbed a knack for making things by hand, a creative impulse that sent Narcissister, at age 9 or 10, to sit in on undergraduate art classes at UCSD, the youngest person in those rooms for years to come. A precocious pre-teen, Narcissister became fascinated with how the female body functions, narrating in her 2018 documentary Narcissister Organ Player that she noticed how Sarah would stretch out her hamstrings naked—her tampon string hanging out—or the way she’d burp loudly, or wipe herself brusquely after urinating. A strange, vaginal shape on Narcissister’s parents’ closet door became an object of intrigue, she recalled, prompting her to notice vaginas in all sorts of unlikely places. “As a child, I’d see these forms everywhere,” Narcissister once told an interviewer, “and I’d ask [my mother] very pointed questions and shock her from a young age.”

In middle school Narcissister gravitated toward gymnastics, and in high school running. But she wanted to become an artist, and planned on going to art school for college. Her parents had other ideas, convincing her to enroll at Brown, where she earned her BA in African American Studies while making friends with the art freaks down the street at the Rhode Island School of Design. This was in the early ‘90s, when the artist Kara Walker was earning her MFA at RISD, innovating the black, cut-paper silhouettes that would make her famous. Laid out on stark, white walls, Walker’s magic lantern-like cut-outs depict the brutalities of the antebellum South, and foreground both the ugly romanticism of plantation life and the violent exploitation and stereotype of Black people. Around this time Narcissister also met Faith Ringgold, with whom she studied for one semester at UCSD on a break from Brown. Ringgold began as a painter, creating large canvases like American People Series #20: Die (1967)—a recent highlight of MoMA’s permanent collection rehang—which expresses America’s race relations in the 1960s through the startling composition of a blood-soaked massacre. Later, Ringgold would turn to Black craft traditions, making clothing, jewelry, dolls, and “story quilts” depicting everyday African American life in Harlem.

Both artists offered Narcissister an inspiring visual language to articulate how she felt growing up mixed-race in predominantly white La Jolla, and how she was feeling as a young adult, subject to the lusting gaze of white men at a time when, in sun-soaked southern California, her skin was considerably darker. Whether consciously or not, Narcissister told me, she decided to leverage that perceived exoticism, going “all in” sexually, so to speak, to take control of a lopsided power dynamic. “I was trying to get power, love, affection, and stability through my body,” she said, but over time this promiscuity became painful; as she got older, “the complex relationship I had with my racial identity—mixed with my perceived eroticism—just backfired so many times.” Eventually she started therapy, and in our conversations together, therapy came up over and over again in the context of those years, as well as her first years in New York, where she moved after college on a dance scholarship from Alvin Ailey’s The Ailey School. These difficult early experiences with sexuality, intersecting with race and gender, became the seed for Narcissister.

She was working at the time on window displays for Manhattan retailer Daffy’s—a common side gig for struggling artists who have the skill-set to produce fanciful installations. She had moved to the Big Apple to pursue dance, but also to nurture her art practice, quilting, collaging, drawing, and photographing herself in various costumes. An ankle injury and unease with the sport’s competitiveness tabled her nascent dance career. She continued art making, however, and had minor successes here and there, including a stint at the Whitney Museum’s prestigious Independent Studies Program—a heady hotbed of visual art and critical theory. But her artworks weren’t resonating and she found academia stifling.

Then she came upon the mask: the plastic front of a mannequin head stand, which keeps a wig’s hair from tangling. Narcissister thought it would make a great disguise, poking holes in the mouth and eyes so she could see and breathe. It came alive in her hands. At a time when the contemporary art world was obsessed with identity politics and its focus on selfhood, the mask allowed for something different, taking selfhood out of the picture entirely. She was insecure about her own beauty, and the mask represented everything that was wrong with how sexual attraction is conventionally defined for women. It struck a nerve deep within Narcissister’s psyche. “A mask lets people disappear,” she told me. “For me, there’s an element of shame there.” Specifically, it brings her back to the objectification of her teenage years. “When I wear it I become an object. I become a living doll.”

Around the same time, in the early aughts, Narcissister’s window dressing at places like the downtown lingerie store Agent Provocateur gave her access to the niche subculture of neo-burlesque; many of its performers were the store’s clients. Within the scene she met Julie Atlas Muz, who was stripping naked and pulling bags of fake coke out of her vagina. Unlike the straightforward, formulaic striptease of burlesque yore, neo-burlesque accommodated all kinds of acts, from stripping to poetry to more grotesque bodily exploits, in an environment that was inclusive of different body types and performance strategies. It was, and still is, common practice during shows to always cheer the performer on. In a nutshell, it was the perfect safe space for Narcissister to do something daring and different, to take risks with her sexuality on the stage. “I was going to a lot of burlesque shows, and that planted a seed in me. I thought, I can do that. I had been a professional dancer. I was thinking about the politics of race and gender and the body. I was supporting myself through commercial art, window display design, and prop styling. I could build sets. I just needed to bring them together.”

Future Narcissister would need a name that was sexy and would signal—in the predominantly white world of neo-burlesque—that she was a person of color. Thumbing through the dictionary, she came upon the word “narcissist,” combining it with “sister,” short for sisterhood. She entered and won a burlesque competition at Galapagos Art Space, in 2007, where she stripped both herself and a mannequin down to their respective masks before mounting her lifeless stage partner. The act was a hit and the rest, as they say, is history. Since then the mask has become a strategic dissociative device, its anonymity allowing Narcissister to be raunchy, while also letting others project their desires onto her.

It looks nothing like a real face, disturbing in its impossible perfection. In fact, it doesn’t look human at all. When mannequins first came on the scene, in the 19th century, photographers like Eugène Atget were fascinated by the freakish new female effigies populating Parisian department store windows, looking like the capitalist undead, as if they might one day replace us. There’s something of that existential dread in Narcissister’s plastic face, with its impossibly wide eyes, pointy nose, perfectly high cheekbones, and “prim mouth,” as she describes it. Its lifeless gaze and stilted smile are the stuff of sci-fi nightmares, of body snatchers and changelings, of real people being replaced by something sinister. Wanton and expressionless, Narcissister is this bogeyman embodied: an exotic, lithe, provocative female archetype flipped on its head and rendered freakish—a monstrous vision of womanhood.

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Narcissister’s vagina—though something to behold—is not the first to make art. In 1964, Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota inserted a paintbrush into the crotch of her underwear for Vagina Painting. She marked a floor-based sheet of paper with it, feminizing the hyper-masculine medium. Then, of course, we have the legendary Carolee Schneeman, the other “cunt mascot on the men’s art team”—as she called herself in the mid-1970s—who was interested in smashing taboos around desire and the female body, and indicting an art world besotted with its male leads. Her nude body featured prominently in most of her work, though it would make the greatest impression in her infamous Interior Scroll (1975), a major inspiration for Narcissister. In it, Schneeman assumed various life modeling poses while reading from one of her books, after which she stripped fully naked and slowly pulled a long, thin piece of folded paper from her vagina. Its text, which she read aloud, recounted a male filmmaker colleague complaining that her work was too “diaristic” and “messy” for his taste. Years later Schneeman said that, “the culture’s terror of making overt what it wished to suppress fuelled the image.”

A lot has transpired since the 1970s, when second wave feminism was chipping away at gender-based discrimination. Eve Ensler’s 1996 play The Vagina Monologues made the word vagina mainstream, then became a theatrical vehicle for passé notions of feminism in the 2010s, when transgender rights movements made the vagina an old-fashioned signifier of womanhood. The ‘80s and ‘90s were also decades when multiracial feminism took hold, taking issue with second wave feminism’s focus on the experiences of white, middle class women at the expense of women of color, who were left on the margins. “There are no gender relations per se,” feminist philosopher Sandra Harding claimed in 1991, “but only gender relations as constructed by and between classes, races, and cultures.” It was around this time, when Narcissister was coming of artistic age and grappling with her racial identity, that her attitudes towards Schneeman changed; while she was inspired by Interior Scroll for its fearless and pioneering use of the reproductive organ, she also found Schneeman’s brand of feminism too reliant on the artist’s conventional beauty and personal identity, and wanted to put forward a version of womanhood that was alien and unpredictable, even sinister. The mask’s unearthly anonymity was part of that strategy, as was Narcissister’s consistent deployment of race throughout her work.

When Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent, in 2011, she strode on stage as a Black Little Red Riding Hood before flipping herself over in a perfect handstand. Her legs spread wide to reveal a whole other character right side up, its white head planted squarely on her crotch. The costume for Upside Down (2011) was based on one of Narcissister’s childhood Topsy Turvy Dolls, a classic piece of Americana that features two figures joined at the hip. While most of the show’s audience likely missed the reference, Narcissister’s costume clearly nodded to the disturbing history of their antebellum origins, handmade by enslaved women on Southern plantations as a socializing tool to teach Black enslaved children and white master’s daughters their respective household roles.

To critics like Katie Cercone, this act made Narcissister a “beguiling icon of a raceless, genderless, classless future feminism to come,” while others, like Ariel Osterweis and Barbara Browning, have proposed that Narcissister’s autoeroticism allows her to reclaim agency of her own Black body in ways that she could less likely achieve in real life. I don’t think Narcissister sees a future so rosy or art so redeemable. She might take the side of the more pessimistic Tiffany Barber, whose impenetrably academic essay on the artist, “Narcissister: A Truly Kinky Artist,” proposes that Narcissister is instead pointing to the limits of such utopian thinking, and to the persistence of entrenched racial dynamics: “Black subjugation and sexual transgression remain entangled in the early twenty-first century, even amid renewed interests [in] racial reconciliation.” Rather than reconciliation, Narcissister is a vengeful figure, or at least one that upsets the societal notions of normalcy or good behavior that work to control Black women.

Perhaps no Narcissister work is as deliciously vengeful as Man/Woman (2009), a rip-roaring send-up of race play. In the video, Narcissister is dressed as a horny, young white male skater, replete with a ratty black mullet, camo baseball cap, and shiny, plastic Ken doll chest. Waking up hungover on a bare twin mattress, our fuckboy skater is surrounded by empty Buds, dumbbells, and bedroom walls plastered with busty pin-up girls and Bruce Springsteen posters. As the testosterone-laden guitars in Def Leppard’s “Photograph” screech, he pitches a tent in his jeans then shuffles through his spank bank. He picks up Black Tail, rummaging until he finds a fold-out poster of a big-boobed Narcissister with kinky blonde curls and a sheer, pink body thong strapping in place a pair of massive, Black boobs. He slaps the poster onto his wall and whips out his strap-on dick, furiously stroking it. With a jolt he notices that one of his hands has suddenly been replaced by Narcissister’s. Bit by bit, the Black Jezebel of his dreams slowly takes over our white antihero’s body. Laying what remains of his costume on the bed, a victorious Narcissister slaps his suction-y dildo onto his crotch and has her way with him in crazed abandon. She head bangs the dildo in a fellatio frenzy, rides his cock reverse cowgirl, and plants her pussy on his plastic lips, as if they were a fearsome Magic Wand. When he can’t cum she masturbates to her own spread of Black Tail instead—pinching her cartoonish plastic nipples—and becomes a phantasm of Black self-love, tripled: on the wall, in the magazine, and in the flesh.

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On a sunny afternoon in August, three weeks before the premiere of Voyage Into Infinity at Pioneer Works, the space’s Main Hall was humming with activity. A pair of scissor lifts were emitting a cacophony of beeps and whirs. Two installers ascended high into the ceiling, rigging up a swing for Narcissister to climb to naked with the help of a twelve-foot ladder. Another was positioning an array of speakers above a raised stage, on which a hardcore band will play Bad Brains’ “Voyage Into Infinity,” closing out the performance in rageful noise.

I found Isabelle on her hands and knees, cutting down a wide roll of floral fabric to match the height of Pioneer Works’s windows. She was recreating the sequenced window coverings initially workshopped at Kaje. “I’m a little stressed,” she said, referencing her usual solo process overtaken by installers. “I didn’t realize until I got into the space how I’d have to take on this group dynamic.”

As if on cue, someone called her name for help. She scurried to a wide platform in the center of the room, onto which a statue was being placed. It was a cheap, concrete knockoff she’d found of Discobolus, the famous Greek statue of a naked Olympian, reaching back with his discus before hurling it into the air. In 1938, Hitler purchased a life-size, Roman copy of this Greek original, and played it up in Nazi propaganda films as a perfect representation of the Aryan race. In Voyage into Infinity, it will become an animating symbol of white supremacy.

In a run-through of the performance, I watched Narcissister climb onto the rigged swing, swoop through the air, and kick a black ball hanging from the rafters. “We need more anarchy here!” a pyrotechnic specialist from London shouted, gesticulating wildly toward where the spinning disc Narcissister made in July, now released by a latch, had come to a stop. The technician had brought plenty of fire and smoke effects, including rope that emits long tendrils of flame when lit. “We’re all going to die,” I muttered to the Londoner. “No, we’re not,” he responded. “I filed all the paperwork.”

A typical Rube Goldberg Machine derives its humor from unnecessarily complicating simple tasks. In the breakfast machine from Pee-Wee Herman’s Great Adventure fame, heat from a lit candle makes two pinwheels spin, which frees a gigantic anvil that pulls a rope to release an egg, which falls down a bunch of shoots and gets scrambled in a pan—not fried, as Narcissister prefers. The task of her machine, in contrast, is to make the whole thing fall ceremoniously apart, with loud bangs, clatter, and chaos uncannily reflective of our times. Over the past few years, we’ve shuttled between existential crises like the three masked protagonists who begin Voyage Into Infinity by crawling out of a dollhouse and wandering the darkened machine, lost and lit only by a candle, their masks unmoving. They’re like pawns in a world over which they have no control except, perhaps, if they burn it all down. In mid-September, Narcissister will be doing this quite literally, in a fabulous miasma of her own making. ♦